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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 







THE LEISURE OF GOD 



AND ox hi: II 



STUDIES m THE SPIRITUAL 
EVOLUTION 



ot concuss 



JOHN COLEMAN ADAMS 



BOSTON 
UNIVERSALIS'! PUBLISHING HOUSE 
1895 



ft 



Copyright, 1894, 
By Universalist Publishing House. 



C. J. Peters & Son, Type-Setters and Electrotyters. 
Presswork by Berwick & Smith, Boston. 



TO THE MEMORY 

OF 

THIS VOLUME 



is affectionately dedicated 
By His Son. 



PREFACE. 



This volume is presented in the belief that there 
are still readers who rind pleasure and profit in 
sermons. It is addressed first of all to those who 
share, with the congregations to whom these dis- 
courses have been spoken, the larger faith in the 
power, the patience, and the victorious persistence 
of the Divine Love. That system of religious 
thought which grows out of this belief in the in- 
vincible love of the Father, working with the de- 
liberateness, and the calm of omnipotence toward 
its triumph in the salvation of all souls, involves 
a new view of life. It presents new incentives to 
duty. It suggests new interpretations of disci- 
pline. It casts new lights of hope and comfort on 
life's disasters. These various studies upon themes 
related to the belief in the final triumph of good 
seek to frame a theory of faith and life upon the 
"glad tidings, " — not in any exact or formal way, 
but by suggestion and illustration. It is hoped 

v 



vi 



PREFACE. 



that they may serve, not only to deepen the spirit- 
ual life of those who cherish that belief, but also 
to commend it to many who cannot yet trust im- 
plicitly in the unconquerable Love. 

One or two passages have been transferred by 
the author from an earlier volume to these pages, 
where they appear in their original setting, and 
where they may serve to reach a larger circle and 
to illustrate a broader argument. 

Brooklyn, November, 1894. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Leisure of God 1 

II. The Inevitable Conflict 20 

III. The Line of Least Resistance 35 

IV. The Root of All Righteousness 51 

V. Severity in Love 66 

VI. The Law of Reserve 82 

VII. Yesterday, To-day, and Forever .... 98 

VIII. The Victory of the Meek 115 

IX. Immortal Life and Eternal Life .... 129 

X. The Premature Judgment of Divine Things. 143 

XI. Some Things Settled 158 

XII. The Use and Abuse of Optimism 175 

XIII. The Christ in the Creation 189 

XIV. The City That is to Come 202 

XV. White Robes and Palm Branches 219 

vii 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



Job vii. 6. — " My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle." 
Ps. xc. 4. — " For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yester- 
day when it is past, and as a watch in the night." 



Human consciousness knows nothing more awful 
than the swift flight of time. It is a fact which is 
realized in its fulness only by the intellect schooled 
and informed in the impressive details of nature 
and her processes. But when it fairly comes home 
to our minds, supported by all the facts and phenom- 
ena of the outward world, it is overwhelming. The 
passenger upon an ocean steamship has little idea, so 
long as he simply stands upon the deck, and watches 
the steady onward run of the vessel, what forces are 
at work to urge her forward. But let him go down 
to the heart of the ship, where the fires roar and glow, 
and the engines, with their rapid throbs, whirl the 
screw, and he will shrink before the hot haste of the 
powers that speed the great hull on its way. So, too, 
he who goes deep into the heart of nature and of life, 
finds in place of the seeming inertness which strikes 
the superficial eye, a hurry of energy which takes 
away his breath. The placid calm of the sky at 

1 



'2 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



night, the deep silences of the mountain-tops, the 
settled aspect of the earth, the monotonous round of 
the seasons, all cheat the eye with an assumption of 
inactivity which is utterly fallacious. Nature wears 
a mask; he who uncovers her real countenance will 
find, not quiet, but motion, not sluggishness, but 
hurry, — a speed that keeps pace with time's swiftest 
flights, and baffles all human conception. 

One goes out, for example, under the evening stars, 
and scans the firmament. What seems more calm 
than these still deeps of space, whose constellations 
keep the same places they held when the first human 
eye rested upon them, and through which the planets 
move with a stately tread which is without the sem- 
blance of haste ? There are the Pleiades and Orion, 
just as they looked down on the Garden of Eden. 
There shine Arcturus and Sirius, as they glittered in 
the Orient above the tent of faithful Abraham. The 
nightly motion with which they roll past is the only 
one the unthinking man beholds; and that is so 
steady and so even, that it soon ceases to impress, 
and never raises the suggestion of haste. Even those 
vagrants of celestial space, the comets, that break 
upon the order of our little system with their flash- 
ing trains, wax and wane before our eyes like the 
dawning and the dying of the clay ; nor do we hear 
the faintest rustle of speed, nor the jar of a single 
swift wheel. But behind this semblance seek the 
facts, and how they astound and baffle thought. In- 
stead of the placidity and repose we have imagined, 
this outlook into the heavens confronts a scene of 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



3 



motion transcending our power to conceive. The 
earth itself, which seems so solid and immovable 
under our feet, flings its equatorial mass in a dizzy 
spin of one thousand miles to the hour. And every 
time the pendulum swings, our world darts eighteen 
miles on its annual orbit around the sun — a hundred 
miles while the words are spoken which tell of it. 
These slow planets too, as they seem to us, are really 
in swiftest movement. In one short hour Jupiter 
drags his moons thirty thousand miles on their course 
around the sun, and Saturn and his rings traverse 
twenty-one thousand miles in the same orbit. The 
comets are not the slow travellers we think them, 
either; for they go whizzing through the sidereal 
spaces sometimes a million miles an hour. Even the 
stars we call fixed are so only in name. Arcturus 
flies through the heavens two hundred thousand 
miles an hour. And our own blazing sun, himself 
one of this same family, is travelling with all his 
group of satellites toward the constellation Hercules, 
two hundred and forty miles in every minute. We 
are the victims of a tremendous illusion. The things 
we see are not seen as they are. Where we behold 
stillness there is indescribable activity. In place of 
rest we find endless motion. For seeming slowness, 
we must substitute the mightiest conceivable speed. 
When science leads us thus close to the vast ma- 
chinery of the creation, we find it whirling and 
roaring and turning with a speed which mocks 
our pygmy arithmetic, and outstrips our largest 
measures. 



4 



THE LEISURE OF GOB. 



Nor is this the only illustration permitted us of the 
breathless speed at which creation is running. We 
need not look beyond the surface of our own earth to 
find the same contrast between apparent permanence 
of conditions and actual transformations which na- 
ture's forces are crowding into every hour. They 
are dragging two great tidal waves around the world 
in every twenty-four hours, — tides which dig away 
countless atoms from the rocks on every shore, scrap- 
ing down the sands in one place, piling them up in 
another, remodelling every mile of coast on which 
they ebb and flow. These same great forces are 
rolling great rivers incessantly to the sea, wearing 
away the solid land, bearing burdens of soil in solu- 
tion to deposit at the river's mouth. They are push- 
ing great glaciers down mountain slopes, and grind- 
ing rocky ledges to dust-heaps. Obedient to these 
universal forces, mighty currents of air rise in the 
hot draughts of the tropics, and pour swiftly into 
polar regions. Great storm systems are hurrying 
across the continents and the oceans, with such haste 
that not a second passes without some change in wind 
and temperature and humidity. And what restless, 
nervous creatures we find at work illuminating and 
quickening all that lives, in the waves of light and 
the darting electric spark! The sunbeam which falls 
so tranquilly upon you in the summer twilight, took 
but eight minutes to traverse the ninety-five million 
miles of space between you and the sun. Do you 
wonder that it is warm when it reaches you? 

But think once more of the galloping pace at which 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



5 



the forces of repair and decay work upon these bodies 
of ours. That little faithful heart is pumping the life- 
stream to every blood-vessel in the system, seventy 
strokes to the minute. The lungs keep the fires of 
the body burning with a blast of oxygen every three 
seconds. Every time we move a finger we tear down 
just so much tissue, and away go the ready blood- 
corpuscles to deposit fresh material and to repair the 
waste. The telegrams along the nerves flash as 
quickly as lightning, and with the same speed con- 
sciousness answers sensation. The laziest tempera- 
ment cannot hold back these swift arrangements of 
the powers that shape our bodies. The functions of 
the human frame will hurry in spite of the sluggard. 

It is equally easy to discover that the processes of 
the inner, the immaterial, the spiritual world are 
continually presenting themselves under the law of 
illusion. We confront the institutions, the systems 
of religion and philosophy, the doctrines, laws, hab- 
its, opinions, prejudices of men, and it seems to us 
as if the process of change which ought to improve 
and purify them was interminable slow, intolerably 
gradual. We try to discover some signs of improve- 
ment and of change ; but the signs fail, and we fall 
back into a distrust in the teachableness of man, the 
capacity of the spirit for improvement. But even 
as we complain, marvellous works are going on. 
Millions of forces are generating and giving forth 
the light, which is doing its work of renovation and 
transformation. Not a syllable in all the innumerable 
words that fall every hour from human lips is with- 



6 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



out its moral weight and influence. Not a look or a 
thought but is laden with an effect in changing the 
mental and moral status of our race. Every man 
of us is a teacher, a workman, a separate force in 
the continual process of world-building and reform. 
Parents are everywhere teaching children, children 
influencing parents, friends moulding one another's 
thought and lives, the members of society acting and 
reacting upon one another. There is never a second 
of intermission in the business. Who has not noted 
the marvellous and mysterious process by which, 
when a sin or an abuse exists in the world, human 
thought is directed toward it, human conscience awa- 
kened in reference to it, the beginnings of a revolt 
against it started, and the growth set on foot of a 
sentiment which seems to spread as if by magic, 
and finally possesses the minds of all society ? There 
is not an hour's remission of the work. By speech, 
by reading, by sermon, novel, essay, newspaper, by 
collision of hostile minds, by co-operation of sympa- 
thizers, by the pressure of business necessities, and 
by the emergencies of political progress the work is 
pushed. It is the most incessant process in all our 
complex life. While one-half the race is asleep, the 
other half is awake and at work. Thus the wheels 
of progress never stop, but revolve as incessantly as 
planets turn on their axes, or light rushes through 
all the realms of space. 

It is needless to prolong these illustrations. What 
we have seen in this hasty glance we should find to 
be true of all parts and portions of this creation. 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



7 



Nature's processes — and that is only another name 1 
for God's — are slow only in seeming. In reality 
God works with swiftest speed. He hastens to his 
ends. His methods are all rapid. He hurries his 
messengers. He sends them with whip and spur. 
His machinery is all geared for speed. His plans 
do not loiter. If you seek examples of the quick 
despatch of business, go to nature. She has no con- 
solations for drones. This creation, far from being 
one in which slow forces culminate in tardy results, 
is one where the most rapid thought fails to measure 
the speed with which the work of God is progressing. 
It is not true that "the mills of God grind slowly." 
They grind at lightning speed. Day and night, 
summer and winter, in darkness and in light, they 
whir incessantly upon their smoking shafts, without 
a jar and without a break, grinding the infinite har- 
vests of life, and whether men wake or whether they 
sleep, forever hasting with their work. 

Why, then, is it that men call nature, and the 
course of Providence, and the unfolding of life, a 
slow and tedious process? Why do we count the 
days of the Lord as a thousand years, and in the face 
of this inconceivable speed of the divine messengers, 
cry, "How long, O Lord, how long?"? That is the 
common habit of the unthinking ; and I suspect that 
even the most reflective of us fall to chafing- and 
rebelling when we mark the disparity between our 
prayers for the world's salvation and the prospects 
of realizing that blessed event. The trouble is in 
the different standards of the Divine Workman and 



8 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



the human spectators. It lies in the vastness of the 
divine plan and the littleness of the human under- 
standing. It is in the infinite proportions of the 
work God is doing, and the brevity of the time 
afforded us, so far, for observing that work. If 
the work be sufficiently large, the swiftest work- 
man will seem but slow; and the scale of God's 
work is vast enough to account for all his apparent 
deliberateness. It is because the movement of these 
forces is through such vast cycles that they make 
no more impression upon the sense. The planet 
seems to creep through the heavens because it 
swings through such an enormous orbit. The geo- 
logic forces seem to linger at their task because it 
is such a colossal undertaking to make a nebula 
into a habitable world. You can powder a pebble 
in an hour. But to grind down mountain ranges 
and build up continents; to plough the earth with 
glaciers, and then to melt these solid ice-fields 
again ; to grow the giant trees of the carboniferous 
period, and pack them down into coal-beds ; to breed 
the successive types of life, from the mollusk to the 
man — such tasks will involve even the swiftest pro- 
cesses for ages in their work. It is true that Saturn 
travels twenty-one thousand miles an hour ; but then 
he has to move through an orbit whose mean diam- 
eter is sixteen hundred million miles, so it is no 
wonder that he takes two and a half years to trav- 
erse a single sign of the zodiac, and thirty years to 
accomplish his journey round the sun. Nor is it 
strange that this seemingly slow, dreary pace made 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



9 



the ancient astronomers choose Saturn as the symbol 
of lead. And if we try to figure the distances our 
solar system is leaving behind it in its breathless 
race through the realms of sidereal space, they are 
dwarfed into nothing by the side of the distances 
scarcely to be computed, which lie before us ere we 
pass the first starry milestone in our course. The 
mighty speed is but a snail's pace when we think 
of the length of the road which lies ahead. We 
are in a world moved by colossal forces, bounded by 
infinite spaces, set to run through measureless tracks. 
It is only according to these standards that its 
movements seem slow. Every wheel in the ma- 
chinery of creation is spinning at its swiftest. If 
the finished product seem to come slowly from the 
loom, it is because the web is endless. 

This is the fact which accounts for our impatience 
with the deliberateness of God, and the slow unfold- 
ing of his purposes. We misconceive the extent of 
his plans, and fail to comprehend the scale on which 
his creation is arranged. We lay the little measur- 
ing-rule of our short lives against the vast edifices of 
the Divine Architect, and because that marks so lit- 
tle growth, we lose patience with our Father's work. 
We cannot see the capstone put upon the structure, 
and so come to feel that the work is unreasonably 
protracted. We misjudge heaven, because we do not 
comprehend the work heaven has undertaken to do. 
If we dreamed of its vastness, we should never be 
impatient. If we comprehended the constancy and 
speed of the progress, Ave should never doubt the 



10 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



magnitude of the work. The business of this creation 
does not end with the growing of gourds and mush- 
rooms, nor the breeding of gnats. It has a wider 
scope than the ripening of the wheat and the gather- 
ing of the fruits year by year. The heavenly purpose 
covers the formation of worlds, the evolution of life, 
the unfolding of souls. And that is the work of 
centuries and of cycles. If there were nothing but 
coarse work and low aims in the life of the universe, 
its career might be wound up in a year or a month. 
For common things only require common periods of 
time in their completion. But in proportion as ends 
become complex and aims higher, the periods of 
time they need for their completion stretch without 
limits. So that when we rise to the conception of 
this creation, which pictures it as the field in which 
a universe of immortal souls is to be perfected in 
holiness, in joy, and in love, our thought dilates the 
period which this work will take to countless ages 
of time. 

For it is only when we have included in our 
thought this principle of the divine economy, that 
we have begun to get in hand the materials for 
a proper estimate of our own relations to time and 
to eternity, — to life here and life hereafter. The 
speeding days go by us, the years come and vanish, 
life is suddenly spent, and we look with dismay upon 
our slender accomplishments. We see generations 
of men and women brought into this world, detained 
here but a few short years, and then hurried hence 
with little or no moral development worthy of the 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



11 



name. Inevitably the question comes up, "How can 
we do the much that is demanded of us in the little 
time we have allowed us?" Is it possible that we 
are expected to form the final traits of our characters 
in the limits of a brief mortal life ? It is a dark and 
desperate problem, which comes home to the soul 
more and more as its time grows certainly shorter in 
this world, whether its decisive work must necessa- 
rily be done here or never, and whether threescore 
years and ten is an adequate time for the ripening of 
a human spirit. 

It will be enlightening to test that dogma by the 
principle we have been illustrating. If any man 
can do it, and not feel the utter inadequacy of the 
time allotted to the immense task that is set, he cer- 
tainly can have no just conception of the work in- 
volved in the training of a soul to the use of its 
powers. Neither can he have formed any fair idea 
of the relation of the period alloAved to the work that 
is to be done. But let him remember that every new 
step in the rising scale of being shows the Almighty 
bestowing more and more time upon the completion 
and the perfecting of the new type. Let him remem- 
ber that the greatest works of divine might are those 
which have the longest infancy, the longest period 
of nurture and of protection, of moulding and of 
discipline. Then let him remember that in man, in 
the human soul, we come to the first of the order of 
existences for which an endless life is in store. Now 
comes the question: How long is it likely to take 
this new creation, with the germs of an immortal 



12 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



career infolded in its being and the possibilities of 
angelhood dormant in its character, to develop itself? 
Is this the work of a few years? Can the nature 
gauged for eternal ages so fix its traits and exhaust 
its resources as in fifty or sixty years to harden the 
gristle into the bone, and stamp the features of the 
spirit with the expression it must wear forever? The 
settlement of our convictions upon that point ought 
not to be very hard. But everything will depend 
upon whether or not we have mastered the fact of 
God's habit of taking long periods for great works. 
If we have gathered the significance of these thoughts 
we have been reviewing, it would seem as if there 
could be but one answer. 

For, in the first place, man is the chief of God's 
works, as these are encountered in the life of this 
earth. Humanity crowns the long succession of di- 
vine creations. The sentient, conscious soul, rich 
in affections, that answer the heart of God with filial 
love; powerful in a will which rules nature with a 
new sceptre; dowered with the keen and sagacious 
faculties of thought — this is surely the finest prod- 
uct of creative power yet revealed. And how can 
he who spends such ages upon the fabric of the 
lower creatures of his skill toss aside the consum- 
mate flower of his wisdom, love, and power after the 
paltry life of threescore years, and decree that if it 
fails of promise then, it must be cast into the 
abyss ? 

God has taken years which no geologist dares com- 
pute, in bringing this world into habitable shape. 



THE LEISURE OF GOB. 



13 



He has required innumerable centuries to mould it, 
to cool it, to drain and dress it, to grow herb and tree 
upon it, to stock it with fuel and with food, to adjust 
its climates, and to lay the boundaries of its conti- 
nents. Swiftly as his agents work, they have had to 
toil breathlessly since chaos broke up into worlds, to 
arrange the abode of the human soul. And never in 
all that time has the All-wise One deemed it neces- 
sary to turn impatiently from his work, or because 
each new cycle found the world still unprepared, 
give the imperfect beginnings to destruction. God 
never has been arbitrary, impatient, or summary in 
getting the earth ready to be the training-place of 
souls. Can any good reason be given why he should 
take less pains, be less liberal, grant less time, in the 
maturing of a soul itself? Will the same God who 
has taken billions of years to make a place fit for man 
to begin his immortal career, cut his child off from 
his birthright of joy, if, in a sixty years' use of that 
world and its opportunities, he does not show a will 
bent to righteousness and obedience. If many mil- 
lion years have been spent to make a habitable world, 
does it seem consistent or just to allow only three- 
score, or threescore and ten, for putting a soul in 
order ? 

How little do men realize the significance of this 
life, how ill do they conceive the character of their 
God, when they can believe him capable of such 
wanton and impatient dealing with his best work! 
How little, too, do they understand the human soul, 
when they thus assume that unless it can solve the 



14 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



problem of mortal existence in a lifetime, it never 
can; that unless it finds its proper life between the 
cradle and the grave, it never will! It cannot be 
that a God who will allow so much time for the 
making of a world will afford so little for the saving 
of a soul. Why should time be so lavished on the 
lesser work and so stinted on the greater? A nature 
created for eternity cannot develop and fix its char- 
acteristics in a few finite years. To draw a line 
which limits the opportunity of moral choice just 
where the soul parts from the body is as uncongenial 
to the purpose and character of God as it would have 
been if he had arrested the creation when " the even- 
ing and the morning were the first da}'," and said, 
"As thou art now, thou shalt remain forever." That 
was not the divine order with the lower world. It 
will not be with the higher, the realm of immortal 
spirits. God, indeed, makes haste to his great pur- 
poses, but he makes haste more slowly than that. 

There is, moreover, a thought here for the comfort 
of our own hearts, as they grow weary and sick of 
the hard struggle, the tiresome race of years, whose 
end sees them so little in advance of where they stood 
at their beginning. It is heart-sickening to note 
the slow growth of our own souls. We seem year 
after year to stand still, ay, even to go backAvard. 
And sometimes no doubt we do. There is such a 
thing as that terrible decline in rectitude, the fall 
of man. But there are also times in which we 
know that we have not fallen away in purpose or in 
prayer, when yet we seem to be at a standstill, or even 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



15 



worse, in achievement. But that is because Ave do 
not take into account two things. First, the im- 
mense sweep of the orbit in which our souls are 
moving. We forget that we are travelling through 
the eternal ages, and that the magnitude of the scale 
shrinks the span of our few steps. And, more than 
that, our ideals soon outstrip the possibility of per- 
formance, and the ambitious spirit plans tasks for 
itself which ages will not see perfected. We soon 
learn the vastness of the curve along which our eter- 
nal progress lies, and the knowledge overwhelms the 
soul ; and when it eagerly wishes itself at some point 
far in advance of its actual position, the years of 
course will lag while it creeps on to its desire. 
We need that admonition of a wise writer, "Have 
patience with all men, but most of all with thyself." 
Let us remember equally the scope of the work our 
souls have undertaken, and the length of time its 
very nature involves. It is a great and honorable 
distinction which God has conferred upon us in 
laying our path along a curve that projects itself 
infinitely. If we seem slow in our advance, let us 
remember that this is only the semblance, and not 
the reality, and so take courage and move on. 

There is a curious illusion in astronomic study 
which shows the ease with which our senses deceive 
us. It is, of course, a familiar fact that the planets 
of the solar system move in one direction about the 
sun. So that if we saw them as they absolutely are, 
they would seem to make a steady march forward 
through the clustered stars. But because the ob- 



16 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



server on the earth moves at a different rate and 
through a different orbit from the other planets, 
there are times when all of them seem to be reversing 
their true motion, and moving backward through 
space. It is a simple trick of optics, and easily 
explained. But it exactly parallels our own case 
when we take our stand upon the facts and condi- 
tions and characteristics of our mortal and earthly 
life, whose elements are all perishable, whose sea- 
sons and cycles are all brief, and try to judge the 
motions of our souls, which move in different orbits, 
gauged to different standards. Of course the soul's 
life will seem to retrograde, if you look at its growth 
from the standpoint of a constitution and a body 
which grow old and die in half a century. We need 
to correct the error of observation by the sublimer 
facts of spiritual science. Tried by that test, the 
soul moves right onward in one eternal march about 
its divine centre. And we learn anew that we have 
no right to apply the standards of time or of speed 
which our material and mortal life supplies, to the 
functions of a soul that is living to eternity. 

" Days come and go 
In joy or woe ; 
Days go and come in endless sum. 
Only the eternal day shall come, but never go ; 
Only the eternal tide shall never ebb, but flow; 
O long eternity, my soul goes forth to thee! " 

This same correction needs to be applied to the de- 
velopments of society, and the growth of our human 
race. Contrasted with the march of material ad- 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



17 



vantages, how slow seems our gain in morals, the 
refinement of manners, the purification of life ! How 
rapidly men improve their lands, subdue the soil, 
build better dwellings, surround themselves with 
comfort and luxury ! And how slow by comparison 
seems their gain in self-control, in purity of con- 
science, in religious life. While we thrive in the 
lower life we seem to stand still or go backward in 
the higher. But the difference is in the quality of 
the work done, the limits of the life and its relations. 
The material existence moves in quick changes, be- 
cause its years are so few. The spiritual lingers at 
its work, because it is arranged for eternity. 

Even with this thought we shall be likely to under- 
rate the actual speed with which moral growth goes 
on. Measuring all human attempts by what they 
fail to reach rather than by what they have really 
done, we fall into the habit of understating the real 
work of humanity. Much as men do, we think they 
ought to have done more, and so we are chary of our 
praise. Take, for instance, the men and women 
whom Europe sends to us out of her city slums and 
out of her country bogs, deadened, dwarfed, and 
depraved by centuries of ignorance and oppression. 
We take them into the life of this great new world, 
dress them like ourselves, feed them and house 
them, and give them votes like men to the manor 
born ; and, when we have put them to school in this 
new civilization for a year or two, we wonder at their 
slow progress, and complain because they still savor 
of the peat-bog and St. Giles. Then we write 



18 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



them down as inferior races, and say they never 
were meant to associate with Anglo-Saxons! But 
think what they have done, and how much they have 
overcome. This laborer's cottage, with glass in the 
windows, and a carpet on the best room, and flowers 
growing over the little porch, is a great advance upon 
a mud cabin, with one room and a dirt floor, where 
pigs and cattle herd in with the family. These 
people have made great strides. They are coming 
on well. Give but a few generations of this disci- 
pline of free life and fair opportunity, and you will 
count their children among your best citizens. 

So, too, of the negro and the Indian. Why should 
we call them hopelessly inferior? Why should we 
complain at the slow progress they are making ? If 
we count their achievements as we ought, by what 
they have done for themselves, and not by what 
they have not yet accomplished, we need feel only 
joy and satisfaction over their prospects. It is very 
much to have changed wild savages, such as the 
slave-trader brought to these shores and the western 
pioneers found on the plains, into orderly and indus- 
trious people, ambitious and devoted to learning 
better things. But with Hampton Institute and Fisk 
University to tell us how far the advance guard of 
these races has reached, who can find any but words 
of thankfulness and praise for their efforts. They 
have a long past of error and of wrong to undo. 
Shall we not grant them time enough for their great 
work ? 

These thoughts ought to bring us hope and good 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



19 



cheer; they should stimulate our faith and our hope 
in the Lord's providence. The review of our own 
growth, the survey of the world's life, is not un- 
mingled with fears that the steps of progress do not 
keep pace with time. But remember how swiftly 
God is working. Bear in mind that if his footsteps 
ever seem slow it is because they tread an infinite 
road. Though he seem to move with leisurely indif- 
ference to the hot haste of men, he is really speed- 
ing swiftly toward his purposes. 

" Wait ! 'tis the key of pleasure, 

And to the plan of God, 
Oh, tarry thou his leisure, 

Thy soul shall bear no load. 
Wait ! for the time is hasting 

When life shall be made clear, 
And all who know heart-wasting 

Shall feel that God is near! " 

But while we wait let us work! True we have 
the years of eternity in which to toil, but we have 
infinite tasks to perform. We have all the time 
there is, but we have all the work there is too. The 
moral of these thoughts is not, therefore, " Take your 
time," but rather, " Speed your work." It will never 
do to leave to-day's work for to-morrow, nor time's 
work to eternity. To-morrow will bring its own 
tasks. Eternity will be full of its own affairs. Take 
heed to the perfect ways of God, who, though to 
him a thousand years are but as yesterday, neverthe- 
less toils with a constancy and a speed as swift and 
steady as the flow of time itself. 



20 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



THE INEVITABLE CONFLICT. 



" And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and 
under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, 
heard I saying, Blessing, and honor, and glory, and power, be unto 
him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and 
ever." — Rev. v. 13. 



This is one of the ascriptions of universal honor 
to the Son of God, in which the visions of the Seer 
of Patmos abound. To his quickened and fore- 
reaching sight the coming time was destined to 
place one name above all others, and gather the 
united praises of the moral creation about one per- 
son. This impassioned poem which closes the New 
Testament with an outburst of magnificent and ex- 
ultant triumph discloses the end of the age-long 
struggle between good and evil, the climax of the 
spiritual toil which has engaged the saints since time 
began, the fulfilment of the prophecy of the Christ, 
"I will draw all men unto me." That is the event 
in which the whole spiritual creation is to culminate, 
the overthrow of evil, the removal of the curse of sin, 
the joyful obedience of men to God, the universal 
reign of righteousness. 



THE INEVITABLE CONFLICT. 



21 



That is the inviting picture which prophecy pre- 
sents. But if we recall our delighted eyes from this 
vision of the creation that is to be, we find in the 
creation that is a very different condition. Here is 
rebellion, here is evil rampant and defiant, here is 
the deep-rooted sinfulness of the human heart. Vio- 
lence, deceit, and lust, social ferment and national 
feuds, the hateful rivalries of peace, the deadly 
rapacity of trade, the awful disorders of war, shock 
the observant eye, and fill the timid with doubts 
whether the great end can ever be attained, and this 
warfare subdued to the harmony of a righteous crea- 
tion. Between the promised consummation and the 
actual conditions there is a contrast which chills 
many a Christian heart with utter distrust of the 
power of God to overcome evil and accomplish the 
desire of his soul, the deliverance of the moral uni- 
verse from the bonds of sin. This depression, it 
need not be said, you and I are not permitted to 
share. Our faith does not admit a doubt that the 
Lord will accomplish his will, and save the world. 
It does not permit us to question that in some way a 
victory will be secured over the most obstinate souls, 
and the most self-willed taught obedience. That 
is a corollary of our creed. And it involves certain 
deductions, which we too seldom make, of the gra- 
vest personal moment. Given the final state of the 
creation, a condition of reconciliation to God, of 
righteousness, of moral harmony, and over against 
that its present disorderly, sinful estrangement, and 
it follows necessarily that somewhere in the line of 



22 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



time, between the moment where we stand and the 
moment when we shall be delivered there must be 
a point at which each individual soul will accept the 
divine will and submit to the law of God. The day 
of repentance is as certain to come as the day of 
death. It is one of the inevitables of life. 

I say it is one of the inevitables. There are others ; 
and from the various standpoints from which men 
view life, they are accepted as such. There are 
some things which you and I must experience. No 
device we can invent will enable us to circumvent 
them. They bear down upon us as irresistibly as 
the dusk and the darkness crowd on the heels of the 
day; as surely as the remorseless dawn blazes into 
the obscurity of our couches, to chase our slumbers 
away. 

For example, one of the inevitables of life is to 
grow old. That is a matter in which a man has no 
choice. As long as he stays in this body he is sub- 
ject to the conditions of an existence in time. He 
must pass through all the developments which come 
with the lapse of time. Infancy gives place to 
youth, youth to manhood, manhood wears away into 
the limitations of age, and shrivels with the wan- 
ing of the vigor of its pristine powers. Desire 
wakens, waxes, and wanes. Knowledge is forced 
upon the changing mind. Power varies with the 
years. Every feeling and sentiment suffers from 
the incessant vicissitudes attendant upon a lifetime. 
Nobody thinks of the possibility of staying this 
overflow of the stream of time. 



THE INEVITABLE CONFLICT. 



23 



" A Mighty Hand, from an exhaustless urn 
Pours forth the never-ending flood of years 
Among the nations. How the rushing waves 
Bear all before them ! . . . 

There are they who toil, 
And they who strive, and they who feast, and they 
Who hurry to and fro. The sturdy hind — 
Woodman and delver with the spade — and there 
The busy artisan beside his bench, 
And pallid student with his written roll, 
A moment on the mountain billow seen, 
The flood sweeps over them, and they are gone." 

But it is an expectation inseparable from the 
knowledge that we must grow old, that ive shall also 
change with all our belongings and environment. 
If we live in this world it is absolutely certain that 
we change our condition. There is no stability in 
us. The very definition of life involves the occur- 
rence of changes, continuous, necessary, invariable. 
Our bodies are the scene of change from the moment 
the} 7 enter this world till they fall in death. The 
mind changes with its house. We vary in our 
desires, our knowledge, our aims, our beliefs, from 
day to day and year to year. There is nothing more 
fluent, nothing more subject to pressure, alteration, 
change of structure and of functions, than the human 
mind, the will, and the affections. The dogma now 
affirmed as the basis of the new defences of the doc- 
trine of eternal punishment is the most insecure 
foundation it has ever had. It is argued almost 
entirely on the assumed fixity of the character in 
evil. But there is no such thing as fixity of char- 



24 



THE LEISURE OF GOB. 



acter. Character is the most flexible of all thing's. 
It invariably yields to its environment. And with 
its surrounding continually pressing upon it, and 
moulding it toward harmony with divine law, it is 
the blindness of ignorance to prophesy for it a fixity 
in discord and evil forever. The one thing we can 
certainly predict of ourselves is that as time goes on 
we shall change. Nay, we must phrase that differ- 
ently. The one undeniable fact about ourselves is, 
that quite apart from our own will, our prayers, our 
desires, our struggles even, we shall be changed. 
There is no phase of life which forces us more sharply 
upon the sense of our own helplessness in the hands 
of the great powers which move and mould human- 
ity, than this changing aspect of our existence, as 
we are borne from year to year and mood to mood, 
from unconscious infancy to brooding old age. 

Last of all, the inevitable events which our mor- 
tality fixes as sure to come is the death of this body. 
As sure as the fact that we are here to-day, is the 
fact that we shall not be here to-morrow. There are 
a great many things we do not know about our 
earthly existence. The one thing every man does 
know about it, is that he must give it up. So that 
there is no phrase by which we can strengthen our 
words so stout as that which says that a thing is " as 
sure as death." 

" Life, I know not what thou art, 
But know that thou and I must part." 

That is a truth which in our blindness or coward- 
ice we seek to put away from ourselves and keep out 



THE INEVITABLE CONFLICT. 



25 



of mind. But it is a fact of which every man's daily 
life reminds him, with a reiterated emphasis from 
which there is no escape. 

Now, to these three inevitables of age, change, and 
death, the Christian believer adds another, — the life 
after death. We change, we grow old, we die. But 
the faith of the Christian teaches him that after death 
he lives again. He has no choice. Man cannot 
terminate the existence he did not create. He must 
live on in his conscious identity. He is the same 
person, with unchanging personality, after the body 
has resolved into its original dust. Inevitable as 
age, inevitable as change, inevitable as the body's 
death, is the continuous life of the soul in other con- 
ditions. There is no escape from being and from 
continuing to be. The walls of our existence are 
built high around us, and they are effectively barred 
against any desperate soul that seeks to overpass 
them. It is a strange and awful thought that we 
who came into consciousness by no act at all of our 
own, are by no act able to cut the cord of our con- 
tinuous personal life, and sink ourselves in annihi- 
lation. The great debate of Hamlet with himself 
might well have been left unsaid. " To be or not 
to be " is not a debatable question. We are, and we 
are to be. And nothing can exempt us from the 
sweeping, the universal dominion of this rule of 
God's creation. The suicide plays a fool's game. 
He stakes the awful risks of a soul's honor on the 
desperate chance of escaping from himself. And 
that is the one thing of which no man can get clear. 



26 



TEE LEISURE OF GOD. 



You and yourself are wedded forever. The union is 
inevitable. There is no divorce. 

Age, change, death, immortality. Is there any- 
thing else which must be affirmed as the universal 
experience of mankind ? Are there any more of these 
inevitables, exacting their tribute from all who pass 
along the highways of life? There is one more. 
Not, indeed, affirmed in the faith of all Christians, 
but a necessary sequence of the larger faith. In 
the course of our increasing age, out of the suc- 
cessive changes of life, this side death or the other, 
assured by the immortality of the soul, there must 
come an hour when the will, consciously and of its 
own accord, submits to the divine. It may be de- 
layed, it may be for a time evaded. It cannot be 
altogether put off. In some way or another, that, 
too, is an experience which must befall every living 
soul. If we have never made that surrender; if we 
have only made it in part, then we shall certainly 
have it to do. It is as inevitable as age, as change, 
as death, as resurrection. The ultimate condition of 
every moral creature under God's present economy 
is one of submission to the law of the creation, — 
obedience, loyalty, service. The only way to that 
universal destiny of holiness and happiness which 
awaits mankind is through the submission of the 
will to the statutes of the Lord. The path to salva- 
tion lies through humiliation ; and every human heart 
must sometime tread that way. 

Three centuries ago a Spanish adventurer stood 
upon the topmost peaks of the Sierras of Central 



THE INEVITABLE CONFLICT. 27 



America, and saw before him that sight coveted by 
so many eager spirits of his time, the great southern 
sea, or, as we know it, the Pacific Ocean. Far away 
below him, gleaming like silver in the sun, stretched 
the waters toward which his steps were bent, — the 
goal of exploration, the open pathway to India and 
Cathay. The vision must have been one to fill his 
soul with joy, profound and uplifting. For this he 
had climbed the lower hills, for this penetrated the 
forest tangles, for this struggled over the rugged 
spurs of the great range, until now, from its very 
crest, he could see the shores he sought, stretching 
a glad assuring spectacle under his sight. But 
before his feet could press those coasts, before he 
could launch any keel upon those inviting waters, 
he must descend from the high mountain-tops, must 
pass again into the valleys, must struggle through 
the forest jungle, must plunge into the mist and 
damp of the lowlands. The way to the peaceful sea 
lay through inevitable toils, denials, hardships. To 
these he must bend who would pass the portals of this 
coveted ocean. And so perforce must it be said to 
every heart that has struggled up those heights of 
faith from which we see the shores of the great crys- 
tal sea, in which creation's evil is destined to be 
swallowed up. It is a moving vision, which stirs 
the soul with a mighty joy. He who has once seen 
it with faith's strong sight, will not forbear to give 
God thanks for its great assurance of joy to come. 
But before his feet can press that shore, let him 
remember that his soul must pass through the valley 



28 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



of humiliation, his will must traverse the hard path 
of obedience, his heart go through a long journey of 
denials and renunciation. To see the distant ocean 
is not to stand beside it. To behold the glory of the 
world's salvation is not to share it. The impressive 
lesson, often slighted or altogether missed in this 
connection, is that before you and I can partake of 
the joy of the ransomed creation, we must subjugate 
our own wills to Heaven. Nay, that very consum- 
mation will wait for us, nor be complete till we have 
given our consent to be led of God. Before our 
souls can be launched on the glassy sea of perfect 
peace, they must pass the lowlands of self-surrender 
to God. 

I say this most impressive truth of our faith is 
often ignored and its force slighted. It has never 
received the practical emphasis it deserves in our 
personal applications of religious truth. It is not a 
mere abstract deduction. It is not an inconsequen- 
tial inference from the great faith in the world's re- 
demption. It is the most weighty and serious fact 
we have to deal with. It puts a new " inevitable " 
before every soul. It adds another to those experi- 
ences to which we have to submit and for which 
prepare. It puts a new motive before the soul, a 
new appeal into the lips that persuade. 

For see how it enforces the relentlessness of G-od's 
love. We hold a false notion of the divine nature 
if we figure it as lax, as easy, as shifting, or weak. 
Theology, indeed, has pictured such a deity, under 
the delusion that it was conceiving a strong being. 



THE INEVITABLE CONFLICT. 



29 



But there is no such ideal for our God, none so 
worthy of respect, none so majestic and at the same 
time so lovable, as that which shows him absolutely 
inexorable in his love toward his children. For 
there is such a thing as the inexorableness of love. 
There is a love too patient to be tired out, too long- 
suffering to be exhausted, too wise to be outwitted, 
too strong to be resisted, too tender to be defied, too 
intent to be thwarted. Divine love is so strong and 
so enduring that it can never give up its end, never 
abandon one of its own offspring. It can punish 
as well as comfort. It can discipline equally with 
prosperity or with distress. It never hesitates at 
any measure, mild or severe, which will compass its 
principal aims. You cannot escape this love. You 
cannot so offend it as to alienate it. You can never 
run away from its pursuing care. It will never give 
you any peace till you have submitted to its rule. 
It will not leave you to enjoy your sin. It will not 
even permit you to sink into the numbness of de- 
spair, and take the poor comfort of the inertness, the 
moral torpor, which come of a settled habit of evil. 
Even from that vile covert, that last refuge of the 
demoralized and degenerate spirit, the sharp lash of 
the eternal love scourges forth the soul, and com- 
pels it to make for itself new efforts and incur new 
pangs. When the edict went forth from heaven that 
God will have all men to be saved, it was backed 
by all the tremendous enginery of law, by all the 
organized forces of creation; by wisdom divine, 
by power omnipotent, by love inexhaustible. And 



30 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



that, and no less, is the power yon and I undertake 
to resist when we conspire in our sins against the 
peace and order of the universe. 

It is no valid objection to this thought, to say 
that even God himself cannot coerce any soul, to 
which he has given the power of a free will, into 
obedience and submission. If you mean by that, 
that God cannot secure the homage of a soul by 
forcing it into the attitude of an obedience and 
affection which it does not feel, of course there is 
no debate, because nobody is contending for any- 
thing of the sort. But if you mean that God will 
not or cannot bring the soul into a disposition it does 
not wish to feel, or that he cannot alter its bearing 
toward himself, then you are arguing in the face 
of fact and experience. The whole labor of God 
with man is to change the human will into con- 
formity with the divine will. And the world's 
growth is the attestation of the ample power of 
God to work the transformation. From the begin- 
ning God has been compelling reluctant humanity 
to restrain, reform, regulate its life, and train it 
by the life of heaven. Yet nobody has found any 
fault on the score of coercion. Think of these 
other inevitable experiences through which God 
leads us, — the changes which age works, the radical 
power death has over us, the absolute helplessness 
of the will in view of the fact of immortality, which 
forbids it to end its own existence. If God has no 
unnecessary tenderness on the score of coercion when 
he leads us through these inevitable ways, need we 



THE INEVITABLE CONFLICT. 



31 



suspect him of weakening when he comes to the 
grand object they all have in view? A man grows 
old whether he will or no. His surroundings change, 
and he with them, no matter what his will is. God 
disengages his soul from his body even when he 
rebels most keenly. He is doomed to immortality 
from the beginning. Is it any more offensive to 
thought to add to these the blessed truth which 
crowns them all with light and mercy, that he is 
"fated to be free" from the thrall of sin, that he 
is "doomed to salvation "? 

But if this truth reminds us of the relentlessness 
of divine love, so, too, it makes us feel how personal 
and particular is this matter of salvation. It is not 
to be conceived as a general and indefinite event, 
which is' to fall in some way, involving no cost to 
the sluggish and no sacrifice to the selfish. Our 
salvation is as personal a matter as age, or change, 
or death. It comes to every one in the same certain 
and particular way as each of these other inevitables. 
I fear we are given to thinking of this great fact 
of destiny as something which is to befall the race 
en masse, which is to affect it as a whole, never 
coming home to the individual soul in the pressure 
of a personal experience. And here, if anywhere, 
is likely to be the weakness of the faith we hold in 
the minds of those who receive it without an in- 
sight into its logical outcome. If we were to think 
of salvation as a matter which God will take care 
of without our help; if we were to feel that it is 
one of those general events which touches very 



32 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



lightly on individual life; if we were to count it 
as God's work, and not ours, then, indeed, the 
charge might be brought against us that we loosen 
the bonds of obligation, and open a door of excuse, 
of indifference, of moral sloth to men's consciences. 
But by the very nature of our faith we stand com- 
mitted to a notion utterly at variance with this. 
Salvation never can come to the race as a whole, till 
it has come to each man in particular. The way to 
that millennium, in which we are free from the 
bondage of corruption, is through the strait and 
narrow way, in which no two souls may walk abreast, 
through the portals of personal submission, which 
you and I and all men must pass separately and 
alone. Do not think of heaven as a state to be 
attained just by falling asleep in death, and waking 
in immortality. Not so does the soul escape its sins. 
For salvation is not the change from an earthly to 
a spiritual body ; it is the change from a carnal to a 
heavenly mind. It is not gained by any dependence 
upon the drift of general forces, but by the effort of 
each separate will. Such an effort you and I have 
all to make, if we have not done so already. There 
is no escape possible, no evasion, no possible refusal. 
Sooner or later every one of us must make the effort, 
renounce self and self-seeking, humble pride, and 
accept the blessed will of God as ours. 

"Sooner or later." That is the only part of the 
matter which lies in our hands. The will of God is 
fixed that we must be saved. But it lies with us to 
hasten or to delay the hour which puts us in har- 



THE INEVITABLE CONFLICT. 



33 



. mony with Heaven's will. That factor of the prob- 
lem is left with us. Just as it rests, in great 
measure, with all of us whether we die early or 
live long. The duration of human life is, to some 
extent, in each man's own hands. Discretion, tem- 
perance, purity, sane living, defer the inevitable 
hour of death. Dissipation, excess, and careless- 
ness hasten its coming. Just so it lies in part with 
us whether we will come into subjection to the 
divine will to-day, to-morrow, in ten years, or not 
until a still more distant date. We may postpone 
the hour of our peace with God through long years 
of wretchedness, of hardness of heart, of chastise- 
ment and loss. That is for us to say. "Sooner or 
later " we must submit. The issue is inevitable. 
But how. long we shall be in - the process, how 
severely we shall try the patience of our Father, 
how heavy the penalty we shall bring upon our own 
heads, is for us to say. We may turn to God to-day, 
and life will grow from glory to glory, in a victorious 
development of our best powers. We may continue 
in our indifference and our sin, and suffer the pangs 
of appetites that cannot be appeased, of a rebellious- 
ness which finds its powers of defiance growing 
steadily less, till sin itself palls on us, and Ave sink 
into the stupor of a horrible despair. Either of 
these courses is open to us. But there is only one 
end to both. If we travel by that long and tedious 
and agonizing road away from God, we must retrace 
it all in the sweat of sorrow at last. Hedged in by 
the relentless resistance of love, borne steadily down 



34 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



by the pressure of Heaven's blessed chastisement, we 
shall be brought at last to just the same point at 
which we stand to-day, and shall have to make the 
same decision which here and now would save us 
all the pain of our disobedience and delay. The 
end is inevitable. But the way thither lies by 
either of two roads. Which shall we take ? Which 
do you choose ? Can anybody hesitate ? 

It is one of the marks of a wise man to recognize 
and to provide for the inevitable. As intelligence 
grows and duty presses more strenuously upon the 
heart, we look more and more into the future, and 
plan wisely, not merely for the life of to-day, but 
for the life of all our days. More especially do we 
learn to deport ourselves with judgment and en- 
lightened conscience in view of those things which 
are sure to come to us. For if an}d)ody tries to 
fight against the inevitable, he holds himself up to 
the contempt or the pity of his fellows. How mean 
and trivial is the man or woman who strives to keep 
back the feet of age, rub out the furrows of time 
upon the face, ignore the failing of the sight, the 
weakening of the limbs, the dimming of the facul- 
ties. It is like some puny creature trying to roll 
back Niagara! And what shall we say of him who, 
in his human pride or weakness, tries to put off and 
to ignore the day of his submission to the Lord. 
Good friend, beware! For if you strive with the 
inevitable, you will simply add stupidity to your 
sin. 



THE LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE. 35 



THE LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE. 



Prov. xiii. 15. — " The way of transgressors is hard." 
Prov. iv. 18. — " But the path of the just is as a shining light, that 
shineth more and more unto the perfect day." 



Pour a cup of water on a sloping surface, and 
you shall see the little stream go trickling down- 
ward, not straightaway, but twisting and turning 
and zigzagging in its course. It turns aside at every 
slight impediment, and winds around whatever stands 
in the way of its flow. It yields to the law of gravi- 
tation, and runs down hill. But it does so by fol- 
lowing the easiest path, by going around obstacles 
and not over them, by flowing where there is the 
least opposition. 

This is a simple illustration of a very comprehen- 
sive law, of great consequence in the doctrine of 
evolution. It shows the law of the direction of mo- 
tion. Any body, set to moving, does the same as the 
flowing water. It follows the force that pulls 
the hardest, or goes in a path where it meets with 
the least resistance. Motion always follows the line 
of greatest traction, or the line of least resistance, 
or the resultant of the two. 



36 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



We have constant examples of this law before our 
eyes. Every look into the heavens above shows its 
action on the grandest scale. Every planet and 
every satellite has a momentum which would, if 
acting alone, carry it forward in the direction it is at 
any instant pursuing. Yet at the same time every 
planet and satellite is drawn by an attractive force 
toward its primary body, the earth and Mars and 
Jupiter toward the sun, the moon toward the earth. 
And the course each body follows is along the line 
of least resistance lying between these two opposing 
forces. The curving orbit in which all the planets 
move, our own annual path about the sun, are al- 
ways in the line of least resistance. 

So, too, with terrestrial changes. The motions 
of all the elements of this earth are manifestly 
according to the same law. The land breeze blows 
all night out over the sea. But when the hot sum- 
mer day has dawned, and the sun has heated and 
rarefied the atmosphere over the city, by and by the 
resistance of the air becomes less on the landward, 
and the wind veers to the east. It takes the line of 
least resistance. Hence you owe the cooling draught 
of the summer afternoon to the same law that swings 
the earth about the sun. So, too, every body of 
water on the earth's surface moves in accordance 
with this law. The great lakes force their way to 
Niagara, the river carries them to the sea, through 
the easiest course that can be shaped. And every 
obstacle merely deflects the stream into a direction 
in which motion is less difficult. The old saw that 



THE LINE OF LEAST BE SIS TA NCE. 37 



you cannot make water run up hill is simply a homely 
statement of the universal principle that motion is 
in the direction of the least resistance. 

The law holds a step higher in the creation. It 
is true of organic life and growth. A thoughtful 
writer upon scientific subjects has shown a beautiful 
illustration of it in the development of the plant. 
The root of your plant grows by insinuating itself 
cell by cell through the interstices of the soil. It 
winds and twists whithersoever the impediments it 
meets in its way determine. The crooked roots of 
the mature tree are a record of the obstacles they 
have met, and the easements in the path of their 
growth. And whenever we find a peculiar family 
of plants or of animals largely multiplying in any 
particular place, we know it is because the forces 
antagonistic to that form of life are less there than 
elsewhere. In the words of the great expounder 
of this law, Mr. Spencer, " The preservation of varie- 
ties that succeed better than their allies in coping 
with surrounding conditions, is the continuation of 
vital movement in those directions where the ob- 
stacles to it are most eluded." 

Does the principle hold good when we come to 
human life? A single illustration must hint how 
the law reaches into our organism and its functions. 
Whenever any one of us becomes excited, it is a 
matter of certainty that our emotion will show itself 
in some habitual gesture. There are certain muscles 
which have become accustomed to certain contrac- 
tions in response to certain feelings. And so we 



38 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



make .our familiar gesticulations because habit has 
worn a channel along that particular muscular 
tissue, through which the emotion finds its easiest 
outlet. Thus, when one man doubles his fist to make 
his gesture, while another saws the air with open 
hand, each allows his feeling to escape by the 
readiest route of muscular effort. The emotion 
starts muscular action, which follows the line of 
least resistance. 

The movements of men in bodies, the social and 
political changes in the world, bring this law into 
yet more striking prominence. The populations of 
the globe are scattered in those directions in which 
there is the easiest escape from the destructive forces 
which prey upon life and comfort, and in which the 
least exertion is required in order to obtain the need- 
ful sustenance. Population moves first of all into 
fertile valleys and beside convenient streams, where 
food and water most abound. But when these 
earliest homes of the race become over-crowded, 
the movement is always toward the next easiest 
location. And if, in the exodus of a tribe from its 
crowded fields, it invades those occupied by some 
weaker clan, the latter, making choice between the 
spears and swords of the invaders and the hardships 
of a less hospitable land, and preferring a little 
harder work to extermination or slavery, still illus- 
trate the law, — they move in the direction in which 
they will encounter the least resistance. When men 
choose the pursuits they will follow, they do so with 
reference to their own aptitudes on the one hand, 



THE LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE. 39 



and the inducements offered by surrounding condi- 
tions on the other; i.e., they select the work in life 
which offers them the fewest obstacles. They ex- 
pend their exertions along the line of the least 
resistance. And when the demand for labor in- 
creases, and wages rise in any given place, workmen 
come trooping thither, because they think they live 
more easily on five dollars than on three dollars; 
they put their labor along the line of the greatest 
traction, and the line where the fewest hindrances 
exist to success and comfort. Once again the old 
law is apparent. 

But the application of this law which has the most 
interest to the Christian believer, is its relation to 
ethics and the moral life of man. It is not common 
to trace its manifestations so far as this ; yet here we 
come upon some of its most important functions, and 
discover its power to unlock some of the mysteries 
of man's moral experience. A bearing it certainly 
has on the development and life of conscience, and 
upon the discipline of Divine Providence which 
shapes the destiny of our race. It is traceable in 
the unfolding of the moral sense. It becomes more 
apparent in the moral relations of the human race, 
and even permits us to make a forecast of the out- 
come of the struggles of this sinful humanity. 

It is not necessary that we undertake to account 
for the origin of the moral sense in man, nor to 
describe the method of its workings. Take it as it 
stands, wherever we find men and women. It is a 
fixed and undeniable fact of man's economy. But 



40 



THE LEI SUB E OF GOD. 



mark how it illustrates the law we are unfolding, 
and be prepared to see how it leads us forward to a 
more inspiring discovery still. It is entirely pos- 
sible to describe various ethical processes and expe- 
riences of the human race in these very terms which 
apply to the movement of the solar worlds and the 
changes in society. Take any moral act, and reduce 
it to its elemental phases, and see what it gives us. 
When you are called on to make a moral choice, one 
of two things is certain. If your moral sense is weak, 
and the inducement to evil strong, your decision 
will follow the line of least resistance, and your 
choice be of evil. The man of weak moral nature 
finds it easier for the moment to do wrong than to do 
right. The consequences of his act are in the back- 
ground. The temptation is strong and seductive. 
The restraints of conduct are feeble and but slightly 
considered. It is easier to yield, and his resolution 
is taken in the direction where it meets with the 
least opposition. But when the moral sense has 
been cultivated, and the man is firmly habituated 
to the practice of right, and well-grounded in the 
motives which persuade to it, the case is reversed. 
Then the impediments lie in the way towards evil 
doing. The strongest traction and the least resist- 
ance are toward righteousness. Once learn the art 
of Christian living, and the evil life becomes for- 
ever the hardest to live, this path the most thorny 
to the feet. 

It is at this point that we reach the most inter- 
esting phase of the law we are unfolding, and one 



THE LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE. 41 

most momentous to human souls. If it be the law 
that the activities of mind and soul fall in with the 
rule which governs the motions of matter and the 
manifestations of force, what indications are there 
as to the outcome of these activities? If a weak 
nature yields to evil, that very act makes the next 
one still more easy, and the way to sin and ruin is 
made more smooth with each successive step. The 
currents of evil choice wear down the channel in 
which they run deeper and still deeper; and with the 
progress of the soul in its disobedience, disobedience 
becomes easier and obedience harder. And accord- 
ing to the law we have traced all the way to man's 
moral nature, there is but one issue to the process ; 
and that is continuance in sin, deeper depths of 
perdition forever opening under the falling soul, a 
doom of transgression which becomes more certain 
and irretrievable with each new act of sin. If this 
be the law, and there be no elements in the economy 
of sin and its sequences which we have not touched, 
then what escape is there for the soul once entered 
upon these pernicious practices, which increase the 
tension of the forces- that corrupt, and lessen the 
obstacles in the way of evil choice ? That is not a 
welcome thought to one who hopes for the redemp- 
tion of humanity from the thrall of evil. For it seems 
to seal the doom of a very large proportion of our 
fellowmen to endless evil choice with all its conse- 
quences of woe. 

But here we find ourselves enlightened, both in 
our philosophy and our theology, by a new fact. 



42 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



We do not trace the real application of onr law to 
the moral life of man until we consider the statement 
made by our text, " The way of transgressors is hard." 
That is a truth borne out by every fact of human 
experience , and it has a most important relation to 
the law of moral development along the line of least 
resistance. The resistance offered to the will inclined 
to evil is not altogether in the protest of the moral 
sense. Conscience may lift up its warnings in vain. 
Prudence may be too feeble a motive to withhold the 
soul from the sin to which it is tempted. But con- 
science and the love of right are not the only obstacles 
against which the evil-doer must contend as he pur- 
sues his course of degradation and depravity. There 
are other resistances to be encountered. The down- 
ward path is strewn with impediments. Looking 
into the life of the sinner, and no farther, we find it 
growing more restless and more miserable. Con- 
science may not prick so hard; but passion rages 
more hotly, and torments him with more unbearable 
gnawings. There is a time in the experience of 
wrong-doers when their own evil dispositions turn 
into instruments of torture. • Hatred chafes in the 
impotent desire for revenge that can never be satis- 
fied. Appetite craves more than it can get. Deceit 
sees its flimsy structures of falsehood fall- to the 
ground. It is in the nature of man's constitution 
that he shall find it harder to do wrong than it is to 
do right. And the more wrong he does, the more 
hardships he encounters. The fever and the misery 
of his own nature is one of the gravest obstacles 



THE LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE. ' 43 

which every man meets when he becomes a breaker 
of the divine law. The very constitution of the 
soul rebels against the injuries which are done to it 
when the commandments of God, written in its own 
being, are violated. 

More than that, "the way of transgressors is hard " 
because there are always eternal resistances to be met 
in it, which make it the line of the greatest resis- 
tance. Sin is not only contrary to the inner nature 
of him who commits it; it is against the outivard 
nature in the midst of which he lives. It is contrary 
to man's environment. It is against the nature of 
things. And he who allies himself with evil is 
brought into perpetual collisions with all the crea- 
tion around him. He involves himself in a quarrel 
with every interest of society, with every institution 
devised for man's well-being, with the currents of 
law which sweep through creation from high to low, 
with the forces which move with resistless gravitation 
evermore toward righteousness and the will of God. 
He is against his own body, he is against every atom 
of matter and every ounce of force. " The stars in 
their courses fight against Sisera." Every sin arrays 
itself against the entire universe. It was with a 
poet's insight into this law of creation that Milton 
describes the sequence of man's act of disobe- 
dience : — 

" Earth trembled from her entrails, as again 
In pangs ; and Nature gave a second groan ; 
Sky lowered, and, muttering thunder, some sad drops 
Wept at completing of the mortal sin." 



44 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



Doubtless this palpable fact of the moral constitu- 
tion of nature had much to do with the development 
of the moral sense and the growth of the various 
sanctions of right and wrong. Experience teaches 
men what things are to be avoided and what to be 
sought. And when it was found what Nature favored 
and what she frowned upon, what she made easy and 
what hard, what clashed with the best interests of 
man and what fostered them, moral enlightenment 
increased, the standards of right and wrong were 
formulated, and the bases of those great principles 
laid down on which the moral life of society has 
been reared. The moral growth of man has con- 
sisted in discovering in what direction lay the line 
of least resistance in conduct. The progress of 
mankind has been the application of that knowledge 
to behavior and to desire. In every other function 
of the human race, to discover the easiest way is to 
move in it. And the law covers man's moral activ- 
ities as well. Progress is along the line of least 
resistance. Thus mankind grows better because the 
world is so framed and man himself so constituted 
that it is easier to do right than to do wrong. 
Nature and the soul agree when man does right. 
When he sins they are in irreconcilable conflict. 

Here, then, we find the nature of man and the 
nature of things conspiring to make the way of 
transgressors hard, and to put resistances in the way 
of the sinner. And these are the two decisive ele- 
ments in the soul's development. The evolutionists 
long ago pointed out that there are two main factors 



THE LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE. 45 

in all evolution, — the nature of the organism and 
the nature of the conditions. The case is not differ- 
ent in respect to the spiritual nature. The evolution 
of a soul depends upon the nature of that soul and 
the nature of things. It is determined by the world 
within and the world without. And both, as we 
have seen, combine to make the way of transgression 
hard and that of righteousness easy. "The way of 
transgressors is hard," "But the path of the just is 
as the shining light that shineth more and more 
unto the perfect day." That is the inspired way of 
stating what we have been simply examining as a 
scientific truth, but it is a statement in which the 
philosophers concur. "Progress," says Spencer, "is 
not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of civi- 
lization being artificial, it is a part of nature. . . . 
The modifications mankind have undergone and are 
still undergoing result from a law underlying the 
whole organic creation; and, provided the human 
race continues and the constitution of things remains 
the same, these modifications must end in complete- 
ness." That law is the one which we have been 
tracing, that motion, activity, growth, take place 
along the line of least resistance. And that line 
history, philosophy, and theology all unite in de- 
claring has been drawn straight toward righteous- 
ness, salvation, the perfecting of the human race. 

We are fully justified in making this inference as 
to the relation of the divine purpose to the law of 
the direction of motion. So plain a principle run- 
ning all through the phases of life admits of but one 



46 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



conclusion; i.e., that God intended it to be the law 
of development. And when we find the environment 
and the organism so framed and fitted to each other 
that they both tend to the same result, conviction 
strengthens that God purposed that result. When 
the organism of the oak and the environment which 
fosters its growth unite to produce the sturdy king 
of the field, we consider ourselves justified in con- 
cluding that God meant an oak-tree to be the 
outcome. And when we find a moral nature so 
constituted that it tends to develop along the line 
of rectitude, purity, and love, and an environment 
which offers the least resistance in the direction of 
righteousness, it is a safe inference that God pur- 
posed the development of that nature in the direction 
of righteousness. When he made the way of trans- 
gressors hard, and caused the path of the just to 
shine brighter and brighter unto the perfect day, 
God pointed the direction in which our race was to 
move. He indicated the destiny of man. He 
forecast the consummation of the work of the ages. 
He foreshadowed in that one fact the moral order 
and progress of man, 

" One law, one element, 
And one far-off divine event 
Toward which the whole creation moves." 

We are not to be deterred from this conclusion, 
either, because of the apparent failure of some lives 
to conform to this law. It is true that in this life 
many souls seem to contradict its principles. They 



THE LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE. 47 



appear to go the hardest way and to persist in it. 
They seem to defy environments, or to have fallen 
into surroundings which encourage evil. In either 
case, these instances tend to weaken the evidences of 
the law we have traced, at least in its application to 
the moral order. But there is this much to be said 
in abatement of this objection. Nobody can ever 
claim the power to prophecy just when the resultant 
of the conflicting forces in a soul's life will manifest 
itself in reform, in repentance, in rectitude. The 
forces which deflect the soul into evil are sometimes 
the growth of generations, and the effect of the moral 
environment is slow and cumulative. And because 
it does not show itself to-day, we have no right to in- 
fer that the law is not working. The law may be just 
about to vindicate itself when we give it up. The 
sinner may be on the eve of his conversion when you 
are pronouncing him hardened beyond recovery. 
The work of grace is hidden beyond the power of 
computation. But however deeply it may lie con- 
cealed, it works eternally; and the wind of grace, 
blowing where it listeth, fills at last the sagging 
sails, and wafts the soul to heavenly shores. The 
night before he departed for Damascus, you might 
have said that Saul of Tarsus was an example of the 
power of a human soul to resist the divine purpose, 
and persist in the hardest way. But the morrow 
would have proved you wrong, and manifested again 
the resistless force of the grace of God. Moreover, 
the moral life of the soul does not end with the life 
of the body, any more than the life of the race ends 



48 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



with a single generation. Limit your survey of 
humanity to a single age, and it fails to justify this 
law which appears beyond cavil in a longer perspec- 
tive. And so of the individual soul. What this 
world fails to do shall doubtless be accomplished 
hereafter. But the many times when we have de- 
spaired of its fulfilment in this world, and when it has 
been vindicated before our eyes, ought to prepare us 
to believe that even if the curtain of death hides the 
process, it still goes on, perpetually drawing man 
into the easier way of righteousness and love. 

There are three practical inferences coming out of 
this thought, which bring it into personal range with 
your heart and mine. The first is the obvious one 
of hope for sinners. Do not trust the deceitful ap- 
pearances which fill the mind with despair for the 
hardened wretch who goes heedlessly on his way of 
sin, and seems to have escaped the range of this 
great law of life. He cannot get away from it until 
he can escape from God. The environment of which 
we talk when we speak of the laws and forces of the 
moral world is nothing else than God. It is always 
and forever the pressure of his spirit upon the hearts 
of his creatures. It is the stress of his love which 
makes the way of transgressors hard; and it is the 
tender beneficence of the same love which makes the 
path of the just so resplendent. And so it is in 
the nature of things (which is the nature of God), 
that the way of sin shall be evermore and everywhere 
full of impediments and resistances, and the path of 
right smooth and inviting to the soul of man. While 



THE LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE. 49 

God is round about us it will never happen that our 
environment will foster evil. If in any case it appears 
as if the conditions of life encouraged evil, we must 
remember that we are most likely viewing only a 
segment of the whole circle of influence, and only 
its superficial effects. And while God has the shap- 
ing of the decisive elements of destiny, the soul of 
man and its surroundings, is it consistent with any 
loving and just thought of Deity to suppose that 
he will permit his child to escape him? At last, 
let us firmly believe, it shall be clear to the dark- 
est understanding that the way of transgressors is 
too hard to be trodden any longer. 

Then there comes the thought of circumspection. 
"Ponder the path of thy feet," says the wise man, 
"and let all thy ways be established. Turn not to 
the right hand nor to the left. Remove thy foot from 
evil." You and I have a share in the divine econ- 
omy. We are able to strengthen with our own 
hands those safeguards of life which make the way 
of transgression still harder, and the way of right- 
eousness easier. It lies in human power to help or 
hinder the divine work. Build in your own heart 
the barriers of duty and of obedience, of simple 
purity and stringent rectitude, and you aid the op- 
erations of the heavenly law. Tamper with your 
own or your brother's principles, become his tempter 
into evil, and you retard for him its wholesome 
work. There is need that every man shall keep his 
own walls and fences whole, and help to smooth for 
himself the highway of righteousness. 



50 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



And, finally, let him that sinneth remember that 
this law of life is invariable and remorseless. There 
is no guile of man, no artfulness, no ingenious pru- 
dence, which will enable him to evade the law that 
makes transgression hard. There is always a thought 
of warning, even in this hopeful and reassuring view 
of the divine procedure. Beware! Your sin will 
cost you pain. Be wise! Your rectitude and obe- 
dience are the only conditions on which you may 
obtain a lasting joy. Nothing can remove the ob- 
stacles and resistances from the way of the trans- 
gressor. He who walks therein, walks to pain and 
disaster and moral death. You take your happiness 
in your hand, and put it in the deadliest peril, when 
you go after the enticing promises of sin. The fruits 
of transgression are the apples of Sodom. They turn 
to choking ashes on the lips of him who tastes them. 
For "the way of transgressors is hard, but the path 
of the just is as the shining light." 



THE ROOT OF ALL RIGHTEOUSNESS, 51 



THE EOOT OF ALL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 



Rom. xiii.10. — "Love worketh no ill to his neighbors; therefore 
love is the fulfilling of the law." 



It has always been the desire of man to find a 
motive which should comprehend all righteousness 
and move to every duty. It was the despair of an- 
cient philosophy that it could supply no adequate 
principle to reconcile all the activities of virtue, and 
be a focus where the lines of feeling concentrate to 
be scattered again in deeds. The philosophers, after 
the deepest study of the moral nature of man, con- 
fessed their inability to discover any spiritual power 
capable of effecting the regeneration of the morally 
degraded. And at the same time they failed as sig- 
nally to settle on any single sentiment, any active 
principle in the soul, which could be regarded as the 
root of the true life of humanity, the seed of all right 
action. 

It was reserved for Christianity to do this. It was 
the necessary work of him who claimed to set up a 
kingdom for all men and all times to furnish a uni- 
versal motive, a root of all right living. The recon- 



52 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



ciling principle which men have always sought, and 
which they have believed could and must be found 
in the universal religion, is announced in our text, 
"Love is the fulfilling of the law." That is the 
terse and original statement of the principle given by 
Jesus when he summed up the whole moral code in 
one word : " A new commandment give I unto you, 
that ye love one another." It is Paul's insight into 
what the philosophers had missed and the Saviour 
had revealed. It supplies the missing motive, the 
reconciling spirit, the inclusive principle. Love to 
God and love to man is the animus of the regenerated 
heart, the vital germ in the new man. It is the seed 
of the new and spiritual life, because it is the essen- 
tial nature of God; "For God is love," "and who- 
soever loveth is born of God." This attitude or 
disposition of man's heart is the normal temper of 
his redeemed estate. And out of it come all the 
essential qualities of a righteous life. There is not 
a virtue in all the catalogue that does not root itself 
in the soil of love. There is not a brave or holy deed 
performed in all the list of heroic actions which is 
not the fruit and issue of love. There is no right 
relation toward God or man to which the soul is not 
led and held by the power of love. Nay, more, there 
is no trait in all the character of our God himself 
which does not spring naturally and even necessarily 
from the love which the Scriptures declare is his 
essential nature. 

But let us start in unfolding this truth with a 
proper conception of what love is. Let us not nar- 



THE ROOT OF ALL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 



53 



row it, and misconceive the meaning of the grand- 
est word yet contributed to language. There is no 
proper and exact synonym of love in any ancient 
tongue. Because there never was any true concep- 
tion of love in the sense in which the gospel gave it 
to us. And it is not easy for men, even to-day, to 
comprehend the full meaning of this term. We 
identify it with amiability and mildness and senti- 
mentality. We confuse it with laxness and indul- 
gence. We measure it by the petty standards of 
loves that are partial, weak, and blind; that limit 
their favors to one or two ; that are no more than a 
flush in the blood or a thrill along the nerves. It is 
more than is implied in any of the words by which 
we translate it back into the ancient tongues. For 
it sums up in itself all that the Greek, the Roman, 
or the Hebrew ever meant by the terms in which they 
came the nearest to the thought it expresses. When 
the Jew spoke of love, he meant a kind of " desire" 
or an "aspiration." And the Greek, with his word, 
tried to express the intensity of a personal affection. 
The Latin tongue tainted the idea with an earthiness 
and carnality which the Christian word eliminates. 
And from other languages we get the thought of 
"benevolence" or "charity," which the Christian 
term adopts as partial definitions of its great and 
comprehensive phrase. Love as Paul means it, love 
as it was newly and divinely characterized by the 
Saviour, is a broader and more comprehensive thing 
than any of these, — rises higher, runs deeper, sweeps 
around larger interests, includes nobler ideals. It is 



54 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



a feeling which pervades all conduct, governs all 
motives, sustains every duty, extends to all souls. 
It is the passion which draws the lover to his bride; 
but it is more. It is the affection which begets all 
the sacrifices of the parent for his child; but it is 
more. It is the reverent attachment of the child to 
his father and his mother, the pure bond between 
brother and sister, the golden link of friendship ; but 
it is more. It is the humane prompting which takes 
an interest in humanity; but it is more. It is the 
kindliness which prompts to courtesy, the sensitive 
fairness which insists on perfect equity, the sympathy 
which reaches after the lost, the mercy which softens 
the doom of crime ; but, again, it is more than these. 
For it is the strength and the- courage which dare to 
undertake severities which are destined to end in 
blessings; to be a little hard in order to be very 
tender; and to go forth with the scourge against 
offenders, and draw the sword of retribution against 
the oppressor and his hard-hearted crew. And over 
and above all these peculiarities, love rises beyond 
this earth and the humanity it supports, and exalts 
the soul to heaven's gates, and reaches out for God, 
and loses itself in the Being whence its holy impulse 
was derived. That is what Christianity means by 
love. That is the new passion, born into this world 
with the new man, even Jesus the Christ. It is the 
power which led Jesus to Calvary; it is the motive 
which stirred the heart of God to send him hither 
to man. " For God so loved the world that he gave 
his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in 
him should not perish." 



THE ROOT OF ALL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 55 

This, then, is what we mean when we talk about 
love as the crowning trait of the Christian economy. 
It is no weak and nerveless sentiment. It is no 
bubbling of the emotions. It is no callow and feeble 
yearning. It is a strong, vital, dynamic core in a 
soul, from which is derived the force which animates 
every virtue, the very centre and root of all right- 
eousness. In a heart animated by this principle, 
there is a self-sustaining power of right and goodness. 
Virtue becomes, not a graft upon the soul, but a 
natural outgrowth from it. There is no need of a 
law to bind the father who loves his child to be just 
to the child, because no man would willingly be 
unjust to one whom he loves. There is no law in 
favor of honesty, or purity, or peaceable living 
which is so severe or so exacting as the require- 
ments which a loving heart makes upon itself. The 
"law of liberty," which Paul urges upon Christians, 
is none other than this law of love. It is the law 
which frees us from the bondage to commandments, 
only because it has put us under a voluntary sub- 
mission to the law of love. It is the rule of chas- 
tened and holy affections from within, replacing the 
sway of commandments and rules and compulsions 
from without. It is the tendency of a will, educated 
in the service of pure sentiments, to direct itself to 
God's service and well-doing toward humanity. 

This is the disposition, the bent and direction, of 
the heart converted and reconciled to God; the com- 
pulsion of the higher nature in us, aroused and 
stirred, and moving itself back toward God. And 



56 



THE LEISUBE OF GOD. 



it is a controlling force which, beginning at the 
core of man's nature, becomes the inspiration finally 
of all his life and his conduct. 

It is a familiar truth that an absorbing passion in 
the heart comes to dominate and possess the whole 
life, till the man is at last only an embodiment of 
the idea for which he is living, — a money-coiner if 
he is mercenary ; a seeker for power if he loves do-' 
minion; a voluptuary if pleasure is his god. The 
cherished propensity moulds, assimilates, directs, 
everything that comes into the life, so as to minister 
to its hunger and further its aims. It is at the root 
of the life, and so depides what the life shall be. 
And when the passion which thus nestles in the heart 
is the one comprehensive and regenerative sentiment 
which is inherited from the world's Saviour; when 
it is the same mighty passion which sent him about 
his Father's business ; when it is the tender passion 
which made him the friend of publicans and sinners ; 
when it is the inexorable passion which pierced the 
callousness of Scribes and Pharisees with transfixing 
scorn and denunciation; when it is the over-ruling 
passion which crowned and glorified Calvary with 
the cross, it is not hard to see how love may be the 
decisive and characteristic trait, which, down under 
all other qualities and attributes of the soul, deter- 
mines its essential nature, transforming all the lower 
self of man into holiness, and touching all his life 
with divine grace. 

Nor is it hard to see, again, how from this radical 
force in the soul, there may come all the multiform 



THE HOOT OF ALL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 57 

phases of moral energy, which we call the virtues, 
or group collectively under the name of righteous- 
ness. It is a false notion of the traits and activities 
of the moral nature, to treat them as if they were 
distinct and separate entities, capable of being de- 
veloped apart, of running in different lines, of inde- 
pendent manifestations. That is not their nature. 
They are but instances of the transformation of moral 
force. They illustrate in the physics of the soul the 
same law which obtains in the energies which can 
be tested with material demonstration. They are 
explained as the correlations of spiritual forces. 

There is a celebrated experiment in which a da- 
guerreotype plate is ingeniously connected with a 
galvanometer, a gridiron of silver wires, and a heat- 
registering helix, and then subjected to the action of 
light. The energy which was stored up in the sun- 
beam, when it darted on its long way from the central 
fires of the sun, is transformed by contact with the 
sensitive plate, and resolved into several other modes 
of motion. For with its chemical action upon the 
plate there is produced electricity in the wires, mag- 
netism in the coil, heat in the helix, and molar 
motion in the needles of the index. The energy 
manifested in the solar beam is transformable into 
all the other modes of motion. And from that one 
force radiate all these others. That is what we see 
in the activities of a soul in which the life of love 
has begun. In that sacred energy we find a force 
which is transformable into every manifestation of 
moral life. Whenever the beam of light out of a 



58 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



loving heart falls upon the points of contact with 
other lives, it shifts and modifies its forms, and ap- 
pears in all the various shapes which duty, virtue, 
righteousness, assume. 

Of course we naturally expect and understand 
that it will beget all the deeds of kindness, consid- 
eration, gentleness, mercy, and forgiveness. These 
we associate easily with the impulse of love, and 
readily call them its fruits. We see how all those 
duties which are expected of men and women toward 
one another in the home, and all the relations which 
grow out of the domestic life, are prompted and sus- 
tained by love. All the gifts which bless and edify 
men come spontaneously from the suggestions of 
love. There is no need to number or to name them. 
Whatever kindliness can suggest, and tender solici- 
tude devise, and charity and clemency require, love 
does for its object. That is the very essence of love. 
Because love seeks always the good of the life on 
which it spends itself. u [Love] thinketh no evil," 
says Paul, "rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth 
in the truth." You have a living illustration of 
what love will do, when love means tenderness and 
thoughtful regard for another, in what every true 
mother does for her baby. The parent's heart is a 
mirror of the acts and dispositions of love. There 
is no knowledge, no discipline, no acquirement, won 
by study or by self-restraint, which can ever be de- 
pended upon to suggest the right thing to do for 
others as the instinct of affection always suggests it. 

It is a question whether people realize that there 



THE ROOT OF ALL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 



59 



is no code of manners, and no book of rules on polite- 
ness, which can teach one the things to do and the 
things to leave undone in society with anything like 
the completeness and the accuracy with which they 
may be learned from the impulses of a heart made 
sensitive, sympathetic, and kind by love? Give a 
man or woman such a nature as this, and he may go 
into any circle, and mingle with any classes in soci- 
ety, and always leave a good impression, always win 
a welcome, always please and attract other people. 
Because courtesy is nothing in the world but love in 
its society dress. It is the Golden Rule adapted to 
the drawing-room. There is no infallible way to 
make a man polite except to drill into the very sub- 
stance of his being the Sermon on the Mount. Cour- 
tesy cannot be learned by rote, but it can be learned 
by heart. Indeed, that is the only way of getting it 
perfectly. And when you put a man with a gentle 
heart, full of loving impulses and sensibilities, face 
to face with a problem in politeness, he will always 
prove himself a gentleman. We ought to have a 
great deal of patience with what we often deem a 
rude, clumsy, meaningless, and insincere system, the 
code of etiquette. For even that bundle of conven- 
tionalities is an attempt to formulate social customs, 
so that people will mutually understand one another, 
and not hurt one another's feelings. As far as it 
goes, it is one of the manifestations of love. 

So of the codes of justice by which men aim to 
give one another their dues. They are the attempts 
we make to secure a fair and equitable best for all 



60 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



the world. And there never will be a perfect code 
of laws, there never will be a true justice between 
man and man, according to the unwritten law, until 
we have learned the meaning of the love which 
"doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her 
own, is not easily provoked." Justice seeks to give 
every man his dues. Could love do more ? Justice 
asks every man to deal fairly with his neighbors. 
Is not that love's demand? Nay, more. Could any 
man be a juster judge between two than one who 
loved them both alike ? We all know that the loving 
man loves mercy. But let us not forget that there 
can be none so inflexible as he to "deal justly.'' 
You can trust that man with any human interest 
who loves humanity. He will do justly by his 
brother who loves his brother. Simply because love 
eternally forbids a man to do any wilful harm to his 
fellow-man, love insures right dealing between men. 
It will not overreach. It will not steal. It will 
offer no insult to purity, no violence to life. It is 
bound by its very nature to respect all, honor all, 
jealously guard the rights of all. 

But love goes even farther than this. It utters it- 
self in prohibitions. It grows stern in rebuke. It 
tightens its hand in restraint. The infraction of the 
law of right always rouses love's indignation. For 
love seeks the perfection of its object. Whom you 
love, you long to keep true and right. A truly lov- 
ing soul promptly and sternly resents and rebukes all 
shortcomings, errors, and sins. Love is not afraid 
of discipline. It punishes, not out of irritation, but 



THE ROOT OF ALL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 61 



out of mercy, to warn, to restrain, and to save. 
There is no contradiction between severity and love, 
nor between discipline and love. The love which 
does not dare to punish is a love which does not 
know how to be kind. It is soft-hearted to the point 
of cruelty. It is as foolish as the surgeon who would 
spoil a cure to save a pang. A true, intelligent, 
vigorous love always has mercy enough to punish. 
Blessed are the chastisements of love! They mean 
deliverance and safety to him who is exercised 
thereby. 

There is one more manifestation of love, its cul- 
mination, indeed, and its fullest development, in 
the act of self-sacrifice. Love not only gives what 
comes easily. It does the hard things, the hardest 
possible things. It is ready to offer up time, ease, 
strength of body and of mind. It delights in going 
out to other lives, and lavishing its strength, its 
gifts, its time, in self-forgetful service. It leads 
men into dreary toil, out over stormy seas, and long 
leagues of distance, into fiery furnaces of suffering. 
It carries the tender woman away from the arms of 
father and mother, and all the protection of child- 
hood's home, into strange cities and untried life, for 
the sake of her heart's choice. It leads children to 
forego personal advantages that they may care for 
some dependent one, some mother or sister. It sus- 
tains the household through the denials and suffer- 
ings of poverty. It hoards the precious earnings set 
aside for the boy's education, or puts away the needed 
food from its own lips to buy the luxury for the in- 



62 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



valid. That is what we see as the self-sacrifice of 
love in every-diry life, the commonplaces of experi- 
ence. And sometimes it rises to the levels where all 
men confess in it the true characteristics of heroism, 
pressing to the forefront of battle, hurrying to the 
plague-stricken city, plunging through wild seas for 
the prize of a human life, facing the scorn of a gen- 
eration out of simple loyalty to truth. You can 
depend on nothing less than love to so transmute 
itself into self-sacrifice. All inferior motives stop 
short of the line where renunciation begins. When 
you see your fellow-men enduring their martyrdoms 
of crucifixion, if you scan their faces you will always 
see in them the supernatural gleam of a light bor- 
rowed from the face that looked down from Calvary! 

If, now, we find in the principle of love the root 
of all the righteousness of man, how can we say any 
less of its relation to the divine nature. God's 
righteousness and man's are one in kind. There is 
not one code in heaven and another on earth. We 
are made in God's image. And when we live in the 
spirit of love, we show forth the traits of him who 
begot us. For God is love; and love is the fulfill- 
ing of the law of God's being as well as of ours. 
The same things are to be said of the manifestations 
of love in God as in man. All the divine traits and 
all its activities are but transformations of this one 
central and root principle, which is the essential 
nature of God. There are no contradictions in the 
divine nature. There are no oppositions and un- 
reconcilable contrarieties. There is no changeable- 



THE BOOT OF ALL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 63 



ness in God's character. It is eternally one and 
invariable. All its manifestations are the unfolding 
of love. All its dealings are fraught through and 

o o o 

through with tenderness and justice, pity and re- 
straint, blessing and chastening. 

There is no question about the love of God when 
we talk of what men are pleased to call his blessings 
and his mercies. Whatever strikes us as pleasing, 
or obviously in keeping with an infinite amiability, 
we are accustomed to put to the credit of God's love. 
But when it comes to chastisement, and especially 
to retribution, our faith weakens, our philosophy 
fails, and we begin to talk, forsooth, like all the 
doubting world beside, as if there were something 
else in God besides love, as if there were a conflict- 
ing element in his nature, — judgment clashing with 
mercy, love pleading against severity. 

But why should we create what does not exist? 
We have seen that justice and love are as effect and 
cause in human character, and the moral activity of 
your soul and mine. Is there any call to divorce 
them, or demand a new psychology of our Father's 
mind, in whose image we are created? Does God's 
justice require any more than his love suggests ? Is 
there any contradiction between the Lord's compas- 
sionate pity and his inflexible justice ? 

When justice insists on discipline and retribution, 
there is no failure of the divine love. The penalties 
which fall on evil-doers are their greatest blessings. 
They are the resistance of God to the downward ten- 
dency of vice. It may be true that when a man 



64 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



begins to go down hill, all his earthly neighbors are 
ready to give him a push. But, true or not, that is 
not the way with the powers of the heavenly laws. 
When we try to go down hill, all God's agents unite 
in trying to hold us back. Retribution waits on 
every nerve and every sense, using the agency of the 
acutest suffering to restrain us from waywardness. 
God seeks the good of every creature, and he takes 
the most stringent measures to secure it. And the se- 
verity of the Lord, so far from being inimical to his 
love, is one of its indispensable attributes. It would 
be a feeble love for us, indeed, which smoothed over 
our delinquencies and winked at our sins. The 
love of God is often blessing men the most when it 
spares them the least. He comes in love when he 
comes in judgment. It is only in an imperfect and 
human sense that we can ever see any conflict between 
love and justice, mercy and judgment. As Canon 
Farrar has said, furnishing the strongest arguments 
for the faith he shrinks from holding, " Love is not 
like some white lily hung on a dark expanse of jus- 
tice ; no 4 mere flower hung on a pillar cold and dark 
as stone.' Love is the principle, not the palliative. 
4 Mercy is the only true justice. Justice is but the 
severe form of mercy. 'Unto thee, O Lord, belongeth 
mercy, for thou renderest to every man according to 
his works. ' " 

The faith of the human heart has never won a 
nobler victory than in righting its way through the 
contrarieties and seeming dualities of experience to 
a belief in the unity of the life which underlies the 



THE ROOT OF ALL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 



65 



creation. For the doctrine of God's unity is more 
than a barren dogma which comes to the relief of a 
perplexed theological arithmetic. It is a truth which 
explains divine providence, and lightens the mystery 
of pain, and casts the ray of hope and promise into 
the deepest hells. For it means that whatever 
struggles there may seem to be in the moral uni- 
verse between the dual powers of good and evil, 
they are only the illusions of an imperfect knowl- 
edge, and they correspond to no reality of the infinite 
life. For in God we find a perfect unity of motive, 
affection, and will. His nature can have no collis- 
ions with itself. The scheme of salvation represents 
no strife in the mind of God. It is only the direct 
and inevitable issue of mercy out of love, moving on 
through all the stages of justice, retribution, forgive- 
ness, penalty, and purification to its own high ends 
of redemption. There is only one law of the mind 
of God. For " love is the fulfilling of the law." 



66 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



SEVERITY IN LOVE. 



Isa. xiii. 9, 13. — " Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both 
with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall 
destroy the sinners thereof out of it. Therefore will I shake the 
heavens, and the earth shall remove out of her place, in the wrath of 
the Lord of hosts, and in the day of his fierce anger." 



The text is one of those rugged passages which 
rise at intervals all through the Old Testament, like 
so many landmarks of the moral heights to which 
inspiration had led the Jewish mind. Such pas- 
sages are like the lofty Sierras that traverse a con- 
tinent. They run through the Bible as the Rocky 
Mountains through North America. The Bible puts 
God and his righteousness and sovereignty upper- 
most, and out of these facts spring inevitably the 
idea of his displeasure with sin and his severity in 
dealing with it. So the Old Testament resounds with 
the maledictions, the warnings, the denunciations, 
called forth by the wickedness of Israel, joined with 
threats and prophecies of retribution fairly startling 
in their emphasis. The curse against evil-doers 
resounds through the Hebrew Scriptures, now mut- 
tering in undertones, now sharp and terrible, like 



SEVERITY IN LOVE. 



67 



thunder in the night. The angel with the flaming 
sword before the gates of the lost Eclen is a type of 
the retribution taught in the Old Testament. And 
the stern words of the Saviour in the presence of 
hardened sinners were awful in their vehemence. 

There is no break anywhere. The ancient concep- 
tion is in no sense superseded. The severity of 
God's government is nowhere denied. The gospel 
of love is no contradiction of the earlier truths God 
discovered to his prophets. It is a statement of 
still broader truth, which includes the lesser and ex- 
plains it. When John says, u God is love," he does 
not contradict the words of David, " Him that loveth 
violence, his soul hateth." He merely adds a truth 
to our stock, which shows us the utter incompati- 
bility between good and evil, the righteousness of 
God and the sinfulness of the human soul. He 
gathers up the narrow truth into one vastly more 
comprehensive, and puts even the rigors of God's 
administration under the control of his love. 

For there is no conflict, save in the thought of 
petty minds, between love and severity. They are 
by no means contradictory or mutually exclusive 
terms. On the other hand, the highest love is the 
severest, the most relentless, in its exactions. Love 
does not always rise to the beneficent and helpful 
mood in which it visits its object with a holy wrath 
for wrong-doing. But that love is the noblest which 
dares to be severe ; and the severity which blossoms 
from this stem is a blessing. For when we can risk 
affection in a stern rebuke; when we can run the 



68 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



hazard of misunderstanding and coldness and hate 
in the interests of those from whom we dread these 
dispositions; when love carries us to the height of 
administering any discipline for the sake of its be- 
loved — then it becomes the purest, the wisest, the 
divinest. "It is no small grief to a good nature," 
said Euripides, "to try his friends." So it is the 
highest test of a friendship to be called upon to 
sacrifice it for the good of the friend. The love 
which dares do this is sublime. The love -which 
does not dare is weak and selfish. And so we must 
affirm that severity, so far from having in it anything 
inimical to love, is love's indispensable attribute. 
You do not bear your child the highest sort of love 
when you smooth over his delinquencies, and slacken 
the reins of discipline. Soft words and caresses and 
amiable smiles do not make up love's entire stock. 
This placid, nerveless, feeble sentiment is a poor 
parody of true affection. If you love your child as 
a parent should, you will follow him with discipline, 
visit his errors with retribution, and teach him early 
the stringency he will meet in the administration 
of Heaven. And pray Heaven always to deliver you 
from an affection that cannot be angered; to spare 
you from the smile that no delinquency, no treachery, 
no lie, can teach to frown. But thank Heaven when 
you find a regard that is sincere enough to criticise. 
Rejoice in the friendship which follows you with a 
goad. Be proud of the love which has a scourge for 
your faults, and indignation and wrath against your 
sins. A man should fear nothing so much as friends 



SEVERITY IN LOVE. 



69 



who are too blind to see his faults, and too feeble to 
rebuke them. 

And here you will distinguish, of course, between 
severity and harshness, two qualities never to be 
confounded. Severity is the necessary rigor of dis- 
cipline; harshness is the manner of hard, unloving 
natures. Severity implies the employment of all 
needful means to enforce obedience, while harsh- 
ness hints at a rough and often cruel employment of 
these means. We can bear severity without irrita- 
tion, knowing it to be the prompting of love. But 
it is impossible to think of harshness as having any 
such source ; and so it always galls the heart. The 
intent of severity is to develop through discipline. 
The intent of harshness is to crush and to bruise. 
Harshness is severe, but unjust. Severity is just, but 
never harsh. There is a broad distinction between 
the two terms, which must be kept in mind, espe- 
cially in our present study. 

For in attempting as I shall to illustrate the severity 
of divine love, I do not wish to be understood as de- 
picting a harsh deity. God is always severe; for he 
has made the harmony of the moral creation to depend 
on obedience and subordination, and these he must 
secure. But he is never harsh ; for he does not punish 
in cruelty, nor unduly, nor in any malice. The 
sterner side of God's providence repels us only 
because we are accustomed to connect severity with 
unkindness, with lack of love, with harshness. But 
cleared of the error and superstition which has at- 
tached to it, interpreted alwa} r s by the infinite and 



70 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



changeless love of the Father, this phase of the 
divine dealings, solemn and awful though it be, no 
longer repels nor terrifies. It can only be distasteful 
to that milk-and-water sentimentalism which depre- 
cates severity, and holds off the hand of retribution, 
and preaches a gospel of unlimited indulgence and 
amnesty to wrong-doers. But any fair estimate of 
human life will lay an honest and unmistakable 
emphasis upon the severity of God's economy, as 
one of the elements of his love. 

Consider, in the first place, how exacting God is in 
his demands upon us. Things are so adjusted in this 
universe, that if any part fails to do its appointed 
work, the whole mechanism is thrown out of gear. 
Hence man is held so firmly in the grasp of duty. 
God gives us nothing that we are not fully equal to ; 
but what he has assigned he exacts to the uttermost. 
When he makes a law, he requires implicit obedience 
to his terms. Whether it is a law that a moving 
projectile shall injure what it strikes, or that wine 
shall intoxicate, or that lightning-strokes will kill, 
or that falsehood breeds distrust, the violation of its 
terms brings a warning or a penalty. No man can 
bribe God with half-service. He remits no claim, 
waives no demand. When a man attempts to skulk 
out of his duty, he finds his path hedged in on every 
hand with troubles. For God has put a line of 
sentinel laws and forces around his universe, whose 
business it is to see that nobody shall evade his 
duty without arrest and punishment. So that 
while we may chafe against the power which lays 



SEVERITY IN LOVE. 



71 



these obligations upon us, we can never run away 
from it. 

Again, remember that in the rigid exactions God 
makes upon us, he permits no exemptions. He makes 
no exceptions, has no pets, is divinely impartial. 
His laws are made to cover all cases. They include 
the wandering comet and the falling sparrow. We 
can purchase the executives of earthly laws, or frus- 
trate them, and escape their clutches. But who can 
make himself an outlaw from divine laws ? Can you 
run away from gravitation ? Can you prevail on fire 
not to burn ? Can you expect to be released from the 
duty of being honest, chaste, and temperate? He 
who found in his own nature the code by which the 
universe is governed, and who laid its plans with 
forethought for all ages and conditions, cannot be 
wheedled into making exceptions of special cases 
upon special pleas. The march of his law is mighty, 
irresistible, universal. It provides for the grandest 
combinations, it descends to the most trifling details. 
And, having been enacted with this infinite care for 
the least things, it needs not that it shall be revised 
or amended for any man's especial favor. There can 
be no sublimer thought of this creation than that 
which connects its most comprehensive and far- 
reaching law with the personal and private good 
of each separate soul. But the reverse side of that 
great truth is the personal obligation of every soul 
to obey every law. 

In the light of these great principles, what becomes 
of the easy morality of our day, which does not deem 



72 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



it worth while to be troubled over trifles, or to worry 
over little defections from the right? How do our 
standards compare with these scrupulous tests of the 
Most High? He requires the consecration of all our 
powers and all our acts to his service ; and we put 
him off with a few beggarly works, some poor frag- 
ment of our lives, grudgingly taken off from selfish 
use. He bids us fashion our lives after the nature 
he has given us in Jesus Christ, and we substitute 
the character of some sharp financier, some intriguing 
politician, some coarse voluptuary. God says, "Is 
not the life more than meat, and the body than rai- 
ment? " And we say life is not worth living, without 
riches and luxury and the praise of men. He calls 
on us to abhor that which is evil; and we play with 
it, dandle it, live on amicable terms with it, till we 
lose our sense of its enormity, and come to think that 
God himself is more lenient toward it than strait- 
laced moralists allow. Our nineteenth-century world 
is full of this loose and degenerate philosophy, which 
denies the severer standards, and thinks there is no 
particular harm in anything. And nothing is more 
certain than that it honeycombs societ} T with a moral 
dry rot, which weakens every sacred institution, and 
eats away the foundations of home, of church, of 
state. Our weak excuses for infractions of duty, 
our hardening self-indulgences, our morbid leniency 
toward wrong-doers, our every-day pardoning of 
impenitent criminals, our compromises with felony, 
our tolerance of falsehood and knavery in men we 
trust with public places and responsibilities, our 



SEVERITY IN LOVE. 



73 



specious excuses for lying and for lust, — all this 
paltering with duty in the face of God's stern, 
uncompromising requirement, is a defiance of the 
changeless laws of the moral creation. God makes 
no conditions with us which are not just and loving. 
But when he makes his terms, he holds us severely 
to their fulfilment. And to expect him to be satis- 
fied with heedless, lawless, thoughtless lives, and to 
excuse us from the penalties our own failings jus- 
tify, is to ask him to forget his own nature, and 
repeal his own everlasting statutes. 

If God is severe in his requirements, so is he in 
his disciplines. He who asks much of his children 
sets severe tasks for them, that they may be trained 
to do his will. God teaches us by trials. And no 
teaching compares with his in strict severity. He 
counts no pressure too hard, no work too onerous, 
when the spirit's good is to be sought. His agents 
are no respecters of persons. The world's progress 
is gained through blood and through tears. It has 
cost this marching race of ours measureless sufferings 
to reach its present place, and learn what it knows 
of powers and of laws. God turns man into a world, 
bristling with difficulties and hardships, and requires 
him to work his own way to knowledge, to strength, 
and to virtue. He goads us to effort with sharp 
necessit}^, and blocks the road with barriers which 
tax all our little strength. Thorny and rugged is the 
way which leads to enlightenment and to holiness. 
And yet man's heart is made to be content with 
nothing short of that which the hardship of disci- 



74 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



pline begets. He must labor, he must struggle. 
He must rise, though difficulties environ him from 
the start. No man can penetrate this mystery which 
ordains severity in discipline as the condition of 
success. We only know that that way comes the 
clearest purity, that that way comes the brightest 
knowledge. Everywhere the highest spiritual ex- 
periences are born of adversity. Milton wrote the 
"Paradise Lost" out of a heart overwhelmed with 
distress and trial. Dante's "Divine Comedy" is the 
unburdening of a soul heavy with sorrows of private 
trouble and public calamity. The prophets of Israel 
saw the vision of the blessed future through the hot 
tears that filled their eyes for their country's trans- 
gressions. It is a universal law. Sickness, death, 
tragedies worse than death, reverses more crushing 
than the loss of friends, all pangs of the heart and 
rebuffs of the will, are used to train the soul of man 
to the highest moods of spiritual existence. As 
Goethe says : — 

" Who never ate with tears his bread, 
Who never through the anxious hours 
Sat weeping on his lonely bed, 
He knows you not, ye heavenly powers." 

The prophet's words can never be gainsaid. Our 
God is a refiner's fire. Whom he would purify he 
passes through the flame ! 

But let us pass to consider another phase of the 
divine severity. We have seen the great principles 



SEVERITY IN LOVE. 



75 



on which God administers his laws, his exact re- 
quirements, the rigor with which he maintains his 
statutes, and insists upon their observance. And 
now, as a necessary sequence of these demands, it 
must follow that God will be severe in his retribu- 
tions. If perfect harmony in the creation be the 
divine aim, we may expect the most stringent meas- 
ures to secure it. In order to warn men of the ne- 
cessity of observing his laws, he may be expected to 
attach adequate penalties to the violation of them. 
And so retribution is the invariable consequence of 
the infraction of the divine law. It is the great 
deterrent from sin. As has been well said by an- 
other, "Crime and punishment grow out of one 
stem." That solemn fact is a part of the world's 
common knowledge. We forget it, we ignore it, we 
invent ways of circumventing it. But you cannot 
suppress a great fact of life, and human eyes will 
never be quite shut against the reality of retribution. 

I know these are times when it is the fashion to 
use soft phrases when we talk about the consequences 
of sin. The plain emphasis of the outspoken Hebrew 
does not fit the shrinking lips of our time. For ears 
accustomed only to the mildest truths of Christianity, 
well diluted with worldly complacency, recoil from 
this truth with which we are dealing, except in a form 
so abstract as to be practically useless. There are 
few of us who can read without wincing that terrific 
chapter which sets before us the calamities of which 
Moses warned his people as the consequences of sin. 
And yet not one line is drawn too heavily. Those 



76 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



words are fearful in their intensity. Nothing in the 
poetry or oratory of the world approaches the sub- 
limity of those denunciations. Yet they are only a 
feeble picture of what came to pass in Israel's life. 
Says Dean Milman, "Nothing except the real hor- 
rors of the Jewish history, the miseries of their 
sieges, the cruelty, the contempt, the oppression, 
the persecutions, which for ages this scattered and 
despised and detested nation have endured, can 
approach the tremendous malediction which warned 
them against the violation of their law." But no 
man can know the laws of life, none understand the 
principles on which he himself is judged before 
Heaven's throne, who does not look with open-eyed 
courage at the facts about retribution. 

The first great characteristic in the divine judg- 
ments is their strict adjustment to the gravity of 
offences. The justice of the divine severity is al- 
ways seen in this, that retribution is always propor- 
tionate to the sin. Human punishment is most at 
fault in its failure to measure itself fairly to the 
desert of the offender. Men often suffer, under our 
imperfect law, sentences quite out of proportion to 
their crimes. The deliberate murderer gets off with 
some paltry punishment. The man who sinned in 
the heat of passion, or under aggravated provocation, 
incurs the heaviest penalty the law allows. It is the 
confessed weakness of all finite codes and tribunals 
that they cannot do exact justice. But there is no 
such defect in the courts of heaven. Not only is 
every sin punished, but it is punished justly. The 



SEVERITY IN LOVE. 77 

soul transgressing against feeble light receives one 
sentence ; another going wrong in the face of clear 
knowledge suffers more intensely. When conscience 
is weak in warning, it is equally weak in retribution. 
The degrees of penalty are as fine, as nicely gradu- 
ated, as infinite in number, as the varieties of sin. 
The forms of depravity in man, from the inadvertent 
fault of the simple-hearted to the brutal wickedness 
of the persistently bad, innumerable and complex as 
they are, surprising alike in their variety and their 
originality, have all and each a corresponding penalty. 
The wicked heart never finds God unprepared. For 
every sin has in it the germ of its own punishment. 
It was a divine philosophy which led Dante to paint 
sinners in torment with punishments resembling the 
sins which incurred them. The severity of love al- 
ways links the sin and its consequence together, so 
that the sufferer, while he groans in his anguish, must 
fain say, "It is my just desert." 

That is a crude and bungling theory of punishment 
which assigns all criminal spirits to the same hell, to 
serve out the same endless sentence for offences which 
vary as infinitely as the characters of men. Think 
of condemning the man of honest purpose, who has 
fallen into sins of impulse, to the same retributive 
experiences as a Tiberius or a Borgia. Nay, the 
recompense of sin takes as many forms as the mutable 
thing it follows. It begins in the unrest and rebuke 
of conscience; it grows into the ceaseless surge of 
passions which will not be stilled ; it rises into the 
torment of a diseased and remorse-stricken heart; 



i 

78 THE LEISURE OF GOD. 

it culminates in a fierce rage, burning unassuaged till 
repentance brings relief. The love of God works 
with a severity which is progressive, variable, and 
cumulative. God renders literally "to every man 
according to his works." 

Another fact to be noted in connection with retri- 
bution is its complexity. A sin is never simple in 
its results. The sins of the body affect the mind; 
the sins of mind and heart work outward into the 
flesh. So that physical sins involve mental suffer- 
ing, and inward sins condemn the body to punish- 
ment. The entrance of sin into a human organism 
involves it in the most complicated derangements. 
A man's sins follow him everywhere and torment 
him always. They stamp themselves on his features. 
They lurk in his words. They weaken his step. 
They bring trouble to his friendships. They in- 
terfere with his social relations. They clog his 
business. They prostrate his ambitions, and they 
overturn his whole life. No one can set a limit to 
the stern retributions with which God follows sin. 
There is no telling where they will end. Like 
poisons entering the body, they penetrate the whole 
system. Their action is the same in communities. 
A wrong principle in government, an injustice or a 
public sin, is certain to bring on a retribution which 
involves the entire life of the community. The dis- 
asters which befel Israel are no more than may be 
predicted of any nation which falls away from right- 
eousness. America to-clay, with her intemperance, 
her greed, her political hypocrisy, is as liable to pen- 



SEVERITY IN LOVE. 



79 



alty, and as surely getting it too, as any nation of 
the elder days! 

Once more, the severities of divine love, falling 
on us in retribution, are inevitable. Nowhere do 
these severities assert themselves more uncompro- 
misingly than in the unswerving rigor with which 
they follow up misdemeanors and sins. We may 
delay their action, we sometimes may prolong the 
period of our immunity by shrewd evasions ; but the 
storm bursts at last. The crack of doom startles 
the quiet air, and we are smitten down. The lie 
you had forgotten comes back to your door. The 
lusts you had fostered in secret break loose and fol- 
low you out under the sun. The malignant word 
spoken in the ear is proclaimed from the housetop. 
The laws by which God's decrees are enforced are 
incorruptible servants. You cannot throw them from 
the track, nor bury them up, nor resist them. 
Swiftly or slowly, silently or in thunder tones, they 
work their will, and proclaim judgment on our souls. 
The man who sins throws himself across the eternal 
march of divine power, which turns from its path 
no more than a glacier from its bed. To him who 
defies it, there is no alternative but to be crushed. 

Finally, remember that God's retributions are 
relentless. They never cease their work till it is 
completely done. They never turn aside till they 
have accomplished God's purposes. No form of fate 
that the imagination of man has ever personified is 
so inexorable as the will of God. It will never go 
back, or turn aside, or let go. It would seem abso- 



80 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



lutely pitiless, if it were not a loving will working 
for the highest good of every creature. For our God 
is without variableness or shadow of turning. His 
fiat has gone forth that every soul must suffer for its 
sins, and that decree is irrevocable. 

I know of no theology which bears such a warning 
to sinful men as that which by the gospel we preach 
and believe. For it carries the tidings that God will 
have all men to be saved. So that he who has sunk 
into abject inertness, and would rather suffer all the 
dull pain of endless remorse than rise up and go to 
the Father, is roused from his apathy by the message 
that he cannot rest in this hell whither he has gone 
down. The divine retribution will give him no res- 
pite ; he must move before it. It will not leave him 
till it has brought him through the gates of repent- 
ance. It will never forsake him till it has put him 
inside the heavenly city. 

This, then, is the hidden meaning we spell out of 
the mysterious inscription written all over nature 
and life. The severity of Providence is the severity 
of love. God is exacting that he may save. He is 
severe that he may be kind. He blights only that 
he may the more richly bless. He is indeed severe. 
He uses no dainty touch with us. He lays down no 
easy path for our feet. But back of those frowning 
peaks which rise before us from the moment we first 
begin our clamberings toward heaven, the sunshine 
of God's love is bright and warm. It illumines these 
forbidding crags, and surrounds their awful heights 
with rosy hues. Bleak as they are, the way around 



SEVERITY IN LOVE. 



81 



them leads to sunnier, happier life. But let no man 
expect to walk thither on greensward and roses. The 
way to heaven is over thorns and rocks and slippery 
ledges. Yet, though it seems a hard way, it is nev- 
ertheless God's way. Though long, it leads to rest 
and heaven; though it bristles with dangers, they 
are all the sworn allies of the eternal goodness of 
God. 

" Then welcome each rebuff 
That turns earth's smoothness rough, 
Each sting that bids, nor sit, nor stand, but go! 
Be our joys three parts pain! 
Strive, but hold cheap the strain ; 
Learn, nor account the pang ; 
Dare, never grudge the throe!" 



82 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



THE LAW OF RESERVE. 



Heb. xi. 39, 40. — " And these all, having obtained a good report 
through faith, received not the promise; God having provided some 
better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect." 



There is perhaps no passage in Scripture which 
more explicitly states the Law of Reserve which 
runs through the creation than this text of ours. 
There are utterances not a few which declare the 
progressive unfolding of the Divine Purpose, utter- 
ances which point the thought into the past with all 
its evidences of God's successive steps, utterances 
which point the thought into the future, in assur- 
ance of greater good and greater glory in store. 
" God who at sundry times and in divers manners 
spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, 
hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son," 
says the writer of this same epistle ; and in that 
sentence the whole past becomes luminous with a 
heavenly purpose gradually wrought out. " It doth 
not yet appear," says the apostle, " what we shall be : 
but we know that when he shall appear, we shall be 
like him ; " and in these words the future is set 



THE LAW OF RESERVE. 



83 



ablaze with the splendors of a divine life, unfolding 
for the soul. And in the words of our text, past 
and present are bound together with a strong link 
of relation in the purpose of God — a relation which 
makes the latter daj^s exceed the former in dignity 
and in importance, and which points out the law by 
which God withholds the better things till the last, 
making good the deficits of one age by the fulness 
of the next, and so leading life forward from good to 
better and to best. 

This is the universal law of Providence. What- 
ever is given, there is more in reserve. Back of 
the abundance bestowed, there is a greater in store. 
That which is revealed is but the shadow of what is 
to come. The present is always imperfect without 
the future, as the past was, lacking the present. 
Something must be withheld from Abraham which 
shall be granted to David, and that which Isaiah sees 
in prophecy only, is the living reality of Peter's life 
and Paul's. God's resources are infinite, and man is 
made the recipient of his fulness only according to 
his slow ability to receive. He is led through God's 
fields of beauty, wealth, and blessing, step by step ; 
and little by little are their richness and glory un- 
folded before his eyes. This universe is too great 
a wonder to be flashed all at once upon his vision. 
Life is too profound an experience to be poured 
hastily into his weak heart. The Divine Spirit is 
too subtle and too pervasive to be hurriedly revealed. 
And so all the processes of God imply this very in- 
finitude of his resources and of his riches. Knowl- 



84 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



edge comes slowly. Righteousness grows through 
the longest years. Ages elapse in the maturing 
of the world. From the confusion and wild whirl 
of chaos, to the orderly arrangements of human so- 
ciety, lies the long stretch of aeons which no man 
can number. Hence the condition is inevitable that 
God must fit the gift to the hand that takes it, the 
light to the eyes that see. He must keep back the 
inheritance till the heir is of age. The preparation 
of the physical world, the education of the human 
race, involves, in the very nature of the case, the 
withholding of the finer forces and resources until 
the beings have come who can use them, the minds 
that can comprehend them. The thought which 
this law suggests is significant and very necessary 
to a right understanding of this life of ours. 
There is a divine Law of Reserve in the adminis- 
tration of the resources of God. Our Maker is for- 
ever withholding. Yet he withholds to-clay only that 
he may give to-morrow. He bestows as fast as we 
are capable of receiving. After all that he has 
given, there is boundless store remaining. And so 
the future promises revelations richer than the past 
has conferred; the ages that lie before will witness 
the same bestowments which have made us rich. 
As fast as we are ready or have need, the abundance 
of the heaventy treasures will be disclosed, and all 
God's glory forever made to pass before our eyes. 

I do not think it is necessary to demonstrate this 
law. It is too well understood and too widely 
accepted. It is almost everybody's creed to-day. 



THE LAW OF RESERVE. 



85 



For this is the thought which underlies that trite 
remark of our day, and which reveals the struggling 
efforts of men to state their sense of this movement 
of God's providence, "I believe in progression." 
Taken by itself that is a somewhat meaningless 
sentence. But taken in the light of to-day's prob- 
lems, and to-day's thought, and to-day's aspirations, it 
is a declaration of substantially those things uttered 
in the text, and set forth in this great law of the 
creation. It is the belief which has taken hold of this 
generation, in development, in evolution, in the prog- 
ress of providence, in all that these great facts imply, 
including this law of reserve. A faith so common 
need not be demonstrated. Let us take it for 
granted, and then let us do with it as the mathe- 
matician does with the propositions which come 
logically out of any theorem. Let us deduce the 
corollaries of this law. Let us investigate their 
moral and spiritual bearing. 

I. The first corollary is, that God in every age has 
been bestowing himself and his abundance upon his 
creation, " These all having obtained a good report 
through faith, received not the promise," says the 
text. No, they failed of the fulness of a larger day ; 
but they " obtained," nevertheless. They did not 
get the whole, but they got much. They did not 
hear the fuller, clearer accents of the Holy Voice. 
For these would have fallen upon ears too gross to 
perceive their thrilling harmonies. But God spoke 
to them, and they heard him. Because the divine 
will withholds and keeps in reserve some of the 



86 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



riches of its store, we are not to charge it either with 
partiality or with neglect. It is the tendency of scep- 
ticism to do just this, and to try to criminate God, 
and convict his providence of unfair dealing, be- 
cause the man of the stone age did not have the 
electric light, and because Abraham did not receive 
the promises of the gospel. " Here is an injustice," 
says the critic and the doubter. " This creation you 
pretend to interpret is irreconcilable with a uniform 
equity and love. Some receive more than others. 
Your Deity does not treat his creatures alike. He 
has richer gifts for some generations than he bestows 
upon others. What had Moses and the prophets done 
that they should not have all the fulness of Christ ? 
What is Israel that it receives the message withheld 
from Egypt, or India, or Cathay?" The answer is 
found in two words, suggested out of this text. 

The first is, that God's children all receive some- 
thing, and that according to their capacity for using. 
God has never withheld himself from any of his 
creatures. His abundance has something for each 
and for all. Whatever a given soul, whatever a par- 
ticular race, is ready to receive, God bestows. There 
is a correspondence between the gift and him who 
receives it. Electricity in the hands of a Hottentot 
would be no boon. The savage could not use it. 
The Sermon on the Mount was a spiritual utterance 
beyond the grasp of Abraham. He could not, in his 
day, with all his consciousness of God, have under- 
stood or lived out its divine ethics. Abraham rejoiced 
in a certain vision and knowledge of God; and if, in- 



THE LAW OF RESERVE. 87 



deed, it were not the highest, it was higher than his 
own conceptions, and it raised him np in spirit. The 
savage uses the stone hatchet or 'the flint-headed ar- 
row, which represents his highest inventive genius, 
proud of his own skill, and pluming himself on his 
superiority to his less ingenious brother. 

" To each according to his several ability," is the 
law by which divine providence distributes its bounty. 
And in a progressive scheme, an economy which pro- 
ceeds from small to great, and from the imperfect 
to the perfect, it is obvious that the earlier individ- 
uals will come short of their successors, both in capa- 
city and in inheritance. 

In view of these palpable facts, this evident law of 
the creation, it is hard to see the grounds for the in- 
tense aversion which some who claim to be accurate 
students and thinkers exhibit toward the idea that 
God can have chosen any race or any individuals 
through whom to communicate himself to men. 

1. The same argument which is held to constitute 
an objection to the idea of revelation by a chosen 
race would challenge the divine goodness because 
the nineteenth century is more enlightened than the 
sixteenth. 

2. It would challenge divine goodness because 
Michael Angelo is more gifted than the village sign- 
painter. 

3. It is the argument of Mill and Inofersoll over 
again against the goodness of God because of the lack 
of uniformity in human life. 

4. It fails to note the doctrine that we are all 



88 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



"members one of another; that all gifts are for all 
humanity; that all are for each, and each is for all." 

5. It is a narrow argument, conceived in total 
blindness to the universal law of selection. 

In the second place, there is a significant prophecy 
in those words, " that they without us should not be 
made perfect." To one who believes at once in the 
solidarity of the race and its immortality, there is a 
thrilling suggestion in those words. They hint at the 
unity of our race and its life ; how the past is knit 
into the present, and the present back into the past. 
And they lead the thought onward, behind the veil, 
in a query which leans strongly to faith, whether in 
that unseen life, they who came before us in this 
world, they who for our sakes and that we might 
have light, endured the darkness and the gloom of 
less favored times, are not somehow partakers in our 
progress, and we in some way paying back the debt 
under which they have laid us. At all events, this 
much may be said: they who were the earliest 
through with the discipline of earth and its lessons 
were the first to pass on to the higher lessons of the 
unseen world. And under the swifter tutelage of 
that finer condition, they have had ages the start of 
us in the efforts to understand the depths of the wis- 
dom of the knowledge and glory of God. Thus, it 
may be, the balance will be struck and the compensa- 
tion made. 

II. Another corollary of this law is the fact, that 
it involves the notion of forethought or Providence. 
The mind receives one of its strongest impulses to a 



THE LAW OF RESERVE. 



89 



faith in a divine plan in the creation, from the dis- 
covery of the reservations of which the world's life 
is so full, and of their relation to times and seasons 
in the development of that life. The case of the 
atheist or the materialist never looks so weak as 
when we are confronting the evidences of mind and 
purpose in the unfolding of life. It might not be an 
irresistible evidence of a divine provision to see the 
warm mould producing a change in the seed which 
it infolds, whereby the seed bursts and sends up its 
tender stalk ; but when it is seen that this stalk 
is provided with appendages which are perfectly 
adjusted to the external air from which they pro- 
ceed to imbibe a part of the nourishment of the 
new plant; when it appears that the new organ- 
ism is so formed that it will grow on what it 
gets from the ground beneath and from the air 
above ; when this growth is found to proceed ac- 
cording to a definite plan ; when it is seen that that 
plan tends to the production of a fruit and a seed, in 
which are new possibilities of similar plants ; when 
all these facts group themselves into an array of evi- 
dence that there has been an anticipation and a prep- 
aration within the seed of that plant for all its later 
life, — the theory which assigns this foresight and this 
preparation to blind forces of matter, and to mechani- 
cal correspondences, looks totally inadequate. The 
seed bursting in the ground is not so passing strange. 
But the pushing up of those tiny cotyledons ; their 
perfect preparation to find food in the air, for which 
they seem to have been held in reserve ; the ripening 



90 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



of the fruit, delayed until the maturity of the piant, — 
these put a new face on the problem, and make it an 
intellectual effort not to believe in a foreseeing pur- 
pose in the plant's life. It is this holding in reserve 
some of the characteristic features of the plant's life 
until that life has reached certain stages which im- 
presses us with the intelligence which has gone be- 
fore, and prepared for each step of its development. 

So of the more conspicuous manifestations of this 
coincidence of the internal and the external, this res- 
ervation of the resources of life till they are needed. 
It comes home to us with a new force when we see a 
continent opened to the race just at the juncture 
when its fields are most needed by a growing people. 
It is not such a marvel that America should have 
been discovered ; but that its discovery should have 
come when it did ; that its gates should have been 
opened to the Old World just when the forces of civi- 
lization needed a new territory in which to develop 
their best results ; that it should have been held in 
reserve until it could be given, a virgin world, to be 
the home of the highest institutions in politics and in 
religion which human society had yet evolved — this 
patient withholding of the priceless gift until its value 
should be of the highest service to mankind is a start- 
ling and a convincing evidence that Intelligence has 
shaped and Wisdom ordained the progress of the ages. 

The mind which is at all susceptible to this thought 
must perceive that it carries conviction still farther. 
It has a bearing upon the favorite doctrine of evolu- 
tion, and it prescribes the only condition on which 



THE LAW OF RESERVE. 



91 



that hypothesis can maintain itself. This universe, 
with all its high and glorious elements, the mind and 
spirit of man, the intricate organism of the human 
race, may, indeed, have been evolved from the prime- 
val nebula which glowed and stirred when the Spirit 
of God moved upon the face of the deep. It may 
be conceded that creation has been only a process of 
unfolding, and that all the elements of the kosmos 
were involved in the substance from which it sprung. 
But it must be remembered that you can get out of a 
thing no more than there is in it. It makes no dif- 
ference whether that thing be a bird's egg or a world, 
the same law holds. We get no more out of the egg 
than creative power has first stored up there ; neither 
do we out of the primitive nebula, the great world- 
egg. If man, with all his transcendent powers, — his 
reason, capable of tracking the subtlest relations, his 
conscience, seat of moral authority, his affections, 
roots of all the mightiest passions that dignify life, — 
if all these were unfolded from a molten mass that 
whirled and flamed in space, then there was more 
in that nebula than clashing atoms ! There was 
Intelligence in that quivering mass ! There was 
Passion in that flame ! That cloud was quick with 
the sense of Right and Wrong ! For thought and 
love and conscience are not properties of matter. 
And if nothing has been added to the sum-total of 
substances and energies with which the universe was 
started, then the equivalent of the spirit and the mind 
of man lay in the bosom of that luminous mist — it 
was shimmering mind or it was conscious matter ! 



92 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



But somehow these later unfoldings were first in- 
folded there. If you concede that, there is no dif- 
ficulty about your theory of evolution. If you do not 
somehow provide for this necessity, your doctrine 
must go lame. If you will have it that the mind of 
Shakespeare existed potentially in the fires of the sun, 
then you must find there something besides the atoms 
of Shakespeare's body ; you must find the elements 
of his consciousness, the susceptibilities of his mind. 
In short, you must find spirit there, as well as matter. 
For there is a divine essence in the nature of man. 
There is that which allies him to the Infinite, the 
Absolute Life. The very delay in the appearance of 
these features, their late arrival on the scene, only the 
more forcibly impress us with the conviction that 
they must have been involved in the plan from the 
outset, a sort of goal toward which development has 
moved, as they are the point from which a new evolu- 
tion starts. The Power which has held these develop- 
ments in check through the ages must somehow have 
forecast their appearance at last, and involved them 
potentially in the very life-substance of the creation. 

III. If now we can feel the living sense of the 
Life that beats forth from the heart of the Creator 
into the heart of his creation from the beginning, 
and accept as wise and divine his method of gradual 
fulfilment and the long reserves his counsels deem 
best, we shall not be so ready to fall in with the 
pessimism of the age, and judge all the creation by 
the past and the present. The law which holds 
from the beginning until now was evidently enacted 



THE LAW OF RESERVE. 



93 



out of the eternal nature of things. It is for all 
time, and eternity itself. The same law, therefore, 
which has withheld the fulfilment of so many of the 
cravings of humanity, so many of the plans of God, 
until the u fulness of the times," is still in force, and 
still holds back the realization of our dreams and 
desires until the fitting moment comes. How little 
of God's glory has been revealed ! How small a por- 
tion of his exhaustless treasure has been bestowed ! 
How meagre a sketch of his holy purpose has been 
disclosed ! Now, when we see how many of the 
mysteries of man's experience in the past become 
clear and intelligible in the light of the present, are 
we not willing to trust the future to explain what 
still seems dark and insoluble ? If God has held 
back his comforting revelations from the eyes of 
former generations, ought we to expect that he has 
revealed the whole of his wisdom to us? And is 
nothing to be trusted out to the days that are to 
come in this life and that better one to which it 
leads ? How many a trial of childhood shines as 
a blessing in the light of these maturer years ! How 
many a pang of the elder world has proved the birth- 
pain of a better day to man ! They who bore the 
pain could not indeed see its meaning. Once in a 
while there was one like Hugh Latimer, when he 
cried from his martyr's stake to his friend and fel- 
low-victim, " Play the man, Master Ridley ; and we 
shall this day light a candle such as by God's grace 
in England shall never be put out." But for the 
most part the martyr dies without the vision of the 



94 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



triumph of his cause. The heroes of Shiloh and 
Chattanooga and the Wilderness got no glimpse of 
the peace their blood has brought in these better 
days. The apostles had no premonitions of " the 
glorious outcome of their travail in the church 
throughout the world. All these must forego the 
sight of the blessed future, must never set foot in 
the promised land. They die under a cloud. But 
the future lights that cloud with the glorious hues 
of divinest meaning. Can we not trust the goodness 
of him who holds in store for our souls the same 
revelation, the same disclosures of good, the same in- 
terpretations of love and blessing ? Do not quarrel 
with God because he withholds his messages until 
your spirit and mine are prepared to understand 
them. Wait till his wisdom decides that the time 
has come, and then — then you shall know as you 
cannot now. Remember how this principle of re- 
served goodness runs through all God's dealings. 
The blessing is "laid up" until our hearts are ripe 
for it. His comfort will be disclosed in the very 
bosom of the grief. The loss will prove the fore- 
runner of a gain. The bitter cup will be a tonic to 
the soul's best life. 

" Green pastures are before me 

Which yet I have not seen, 
Bright skies will soon be o'er me, 

Where the dark clouds have been. 
My hope I cannot measure, 

My path to life is free, 
My Saviour has my treasure, 

And he will walk with me." 



THE LAW OF RESERVE. 



95 



Finally, it is quite in keeping with this law of re- 
serve that there shall be only the most vague sugges- 
tions in the present of the glory that is to be revealed. 
It has been the law from the beginning that there is 
the scantiest possible material in the things that are 
seen, out of which to construct even a semblance and 
shadow of things that are to appear. Man's pro- 
phetic faculty is always exercised under the heavi- 
est conditions. He can only express his thoughts of 
what is to come in speech which rests on the narrow 
knowledge of to-day. And his imagination, fettered 
to the same conditions, is crippled in the same way. 
We cannot figure to ourselves the glory of the com- 
ing time, because we have not the materials in hand 
out of which to make the pictures. Your ancestors 
of the prehistoric days, the cave-dwellers or the Ar- 
yan herdsmen, could not even have conceived of 
the wonders of a vestibuled railway train. If one 
of them had seen in vision a telephone or a seaman's 
sextant, he could not have described it to any other 
man, nor have understood it himself. These devices 
would have come to him like objects from another 
world. 

Why, then, should we wonder that we cannot see 
nor know the details of the life that death will make 
real to us? How could we expect to see its celestial 
landscape, hear the sweet voices of its angelic hosts, 
or be the witnesses of the daily life of those who 
have passed the bourn ? We have not the faculties. 
We have not the data of knowledge. If the marvels 
of the nineteenth century A.D. would have been 



96 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



indescribable to the mind of a man of the nineteenth 
century B.C., how can we expect the things of the 
world of spirit to be made plain or palpable to the 
mind still incorporate in this flesh. The very sug- 
gestion of such a thing carries with it the presump- 
tion of ignorance and of error. The blind man 
must await the revelation of color until his eyes are 
opened. The deaf man can never feel the ecstasy 
of sweet sound till his ears are unstopped. So you 
and I must wait for the revelation of the unseen 
world until we have finer senses and a different 
knowledge. "For eye hath not seen, nor ear 
heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, 
the things which God hath prepared for them that 
love him." That which is above sense can never be 
made manifest to the senses. And the dreariest rec- 
ord of delusion in all this world is the tale of those 
who have ages been beating at the gates of the other 
country for messages and signs of that which cannot 
be translated into the language of earth. 

Do not repine at this truth, and call it a hard con- 
dition of life. It is the one under which men have 
always lived. It is God's good will and pleasure to 
reserve the disclosure of his good things, revealing 
them from time to time, as we grow fit for their 
bestowment. And when you and I have done with 
the realities of this life, and the veil drops from 
our eyes in the next, then will be the great day of 
disclosure, when, like babes entering upon the won- 
ders of this world, we pass to the new surroundings 
which have been kept in store for us from the foun- 
dation of the world. 



THE LAW OF RESERVE. 



97 



For what lies beyond, for the unrevealed life of 
the immortal, we have no speech, we have no 
dreams! Sometimes an awful glory seems to shine 
in our eyes, and a great thrill lifts our hearts when 
the thought comes that "when He shall appear we 
shall be like Him." But all down the future lies a 
track of growing light, and our feet shall pass that 
way, and our eyes shall see it. 

" Not the light that leaves us darker ; 
Not the gleams that come and go ; 
Not the mirth whose end is madness ; 
Not the joy whose end is woe ; 
Not the notes that die at sunset ; 
Not the fashion of a day ; 
But the everlasting beauty, 
And the endless melody ; 

Heir of Glory, 
That shall be for you and me." 



98 



THE LEISURE OF GOB. 



YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND EOREVEB. 



Heb. xiii. 8. — "Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and 
forever." 



Theee are some relationships in life which never 
can be duplicated, some persons who will keep for- 
ever their own places in human hearts. With all the 
changes of life, a man will hold the same love for 
his mother that he bore her when she led him by the 
hand, or drew him to her bosom. That one place is 
forever sacred to that one soul. And if he be a true 
son, and she a loving mother, there will never be any- 
other who can fill her place in his affection or his 
memory. In the larger life of the world, too, there 
will be and there must be some natures whose char- 
acter or work places them in relations to mankind 
which time cannot sunder or seriously change. Great 
bards may yet appear to enchain men's ears, yet none 
will ever crowd old Homer from his place in human 
honor. As long as men delight in deeds of valor, as 
long as the story-teller wields his spell over the intel- 
lect, will the children of men repeat to each other the 
measures of the "blind old man of Scio's rocky isle." 



YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOREVER. 99 

Emerson has truly said of Plato that he is "a chief 
structure of human wit," "the corner-stone of 
schools," "the fountain-head of literatures." These 
are minds which will always hold the place they 
have made for themselves in the ages. And this is 
the meaning of the writer of our text, when he affirms 
the eternal pre-eminence of Jesus Christ. His was 
a nature with unchanging relations to humanity. 
The place he holds, the work he has done for men, 
is an eternal one. 

But of course the reverse of this truth is equally 
valid. There are certain relations which we sustain 
to other men and to the world which do not change. 
There is a self within us which in one sense does not 
change; there is an identity we never lose. The 
head may whiten and the form bend in the infirmity 
of age; the heart may sadden and lose its wonted 
courage or hope, and still it is the same person who 
walks and thinks and feels, with constant and un- 
changing relations to time and space and events as 
they pass. The most solemn fact of personal life is 
the unchanging identity we carry. We are our- 
selves, the same yesterday, and to-day, and forever. 
We are eternally the same personalities. Wherever 
we are, in time or in space, I am I, and you are you ! 
That is one of the perpetual facts of our existence, 
not to be changed by any mutation of our circum- 
stances nor any development of our natures. Let the 
matter of our bodies change as it will ; let the dis- 
positions, habits, and thoughts of our minds change 
as they may and do, we are the same persons we were 



100 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



in the beginning — we shall be as long as we 
exist. 

It is of the soul, in these its perpetual relations to 
time, that I wish to speak. For since we are in one 
way the same yesterday, and to-day, and forever, then 
yesterday, and to-day, and forever — the past, the 
present, and the future — are always yielding us 
certain elements of life, and are all of them at once 
entering into our lives. Yesterday lives in to-day; 
30 does to-morrow. The past reaches forward to to- 
day; the future already has its hand upon us. No 
present is broadly understood, no to-day is seen in its 
truest and most significant light, which is not viewed 
in its relations to both past and future. Both yes- 
terday and to-morrow enter into the life of to-day ; 
the one by memory, the other by anticipation. But 
there is a deeper and more intimate connection than 
this. We feel the results of }^esterday's life in every 
pulse of to-day's. And the prospect of what to-mor- 
row will bring, or demand, has a controlling influence 
in the plans of to-day. A being with a perpetual, 
continuous life never lets go either the past or the 
future. Of this truth let me speak more fully, and 
show how yesterday, and to-day, and forever mingle 
as one in our lives. 

I. Yesterday. And, in the first place, let us re- 
flect that no yesterday ever quite leaves us. The 
fact that it has gone by us on the stream of time 
does not bear it out of our lives. It is not a thing 
gone. It lives, not only in the memory which sets 
it before us, but in the character it has produced, 



YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOREVER. 101 



the experiences it has contributed, the weakness or 
strength it has wrought into the nature. Yester- 
day's work is never undone. Indeed, it is the one 
thing which cannot be undone! To-day may do 
other work, may mend yesterday's mistakes, or mar 
its solid successes. It can never undo what has been 
done. That must always stand in the long line of 
causes which flows down to to-day, and makes it 
what it is. When Daniel Webster stood in his place 
to maintain the good name of Massachusetts against 
the sneers of her vilifiers, he turned his glance back- 
ward over the history of that noble old common- 
wealth, and, thrilling with the sense of the glory 
which her departed heroes and their brave deeds had 
made imperishable, exclaimed in a passionate out- 
burst, "The past, at least, is secure!" That is one 
of the mercies of God in the blessings he sends. 
Once ours they are always ours. The happy past 
we may be mourning to-day as lost is still our own. 
It lives in feelings refined and sweetened; it lives 
in the power of character; it lives in the wisdom 
trained by its experience. And in this sense it is 
a fact that the past is always present, and yesterday 
is only a part of to-day. As another has said: "All 
the past is shut up within us, and is a perpetual 
present." We see this in the lives of men and 
women who have outlived some circle of noble and 
brilliant friends, choice spirits that once made this 
world radiant, and now set the heart aching for that 
heaven whither they have risen. The lonesome 
spirit cries out, "It is better to have lived with 



102 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



those than to be alive with others." But that very 
cry is testimony to the fact that the past, so be- 
wailed, is more real than any present. It lives in 
memory, in quickened intellect, in affections which 
know no change. 

Especially is this illustrated by the guilt and the 
remorse which past sins lay upon the soul. The 
perpetual presence of the past is one of the chief 
ingredients in the penalty of evil deeds. Sinful 
men would be glad to repeal the statute of God 
which enacts the indissoluble connection between 
yesterday's misdeeds and to-day's misery. But 
alas! The links which make the chain of conscious 
identity, rivet the consequences of sin to its com- 
mission, and make it as impossible for a man to 
escape yesterday's transgression as to run away from 
his own shadow. Sin and suffering go hand in hand, 
and yesterday's crime is the skeleton that haunts to- 
day's banquet. It is yesterday's dram that burns 
to-day in the drunkard's brain, and tortures him 
with the demons of delirium. It is yesterday's cow- 
ardly blow that chills the murderer's heart with the 
freezing horror of a dead man's face. It was a hid- 
eous yesterday that haunted the youth of whom an 
ancient writer tells, who, being reproached for cruelly 
wringing the necks of some young birds, betrayed his 
crime by exclaiming, "It was their own fault; why 
did they keep twittering at me, ' Parricide ! Par- 
ricide ! ' ? " There is no Lethe of sleep, of sweet 
dreams, of absorbing care, of mirth or brilliant scen- 
ery, that can drown the memory and the work of 
yesterday : — 



YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOREVER. 103 



"In a bleak land and desolate, 
Beyond the earth somewhere, 
Went wandering through death's dark gate 
A soul into the air. 

And still, as on and on it fled, 

A wild, waste region through, 
Behind there fell the steady tread 

Of one that did pursue. 

At last it paused and looked aback; 

And then it was aware 
A hideous wretch stood in its track, 

Deformed and cowering there. 

4 And who art thou,' he shrieked with fright, 

' That dost my steps pursue ? 
Go hide thy shapeless form from sight, 

Nor thus pollute my view !' 

The foul shape answered him : ' Alway 

Along thy path I flee ; 
I'm thine own actions ; night and day 

Still must I follow thee.' " 



II. To-day. The fact of personal identity, then, 
and the necessity in the nature of things that the 
soul must carry its past always with it, reveals the 
connection which yesterday keeps up with to-day. 
No day is a thing by itself. We cannot put a wall 
of sleep between our souls and yesterday, and rise 
to-day unencumbered by yesterday's mistake, or 
shorn of its advantages. For all our days enter into 
each new day. You cannot begin to live to-day as 
if you had never lived before. Some light or some 



104 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



shadow descends to you, the legacy of your past. 
And thus to-day takes a larger dignity. It becomes 
a more important thing when we regard it as a sum 
of all our yesterdays. No man so highly values the 
present as he who sees how it is the accumulated 
past. It is the common verdict of men that to put a 
right value on wealth, it is necessary that its posses- 
sor should have put some labor into its accumula- 
tion. If he inherits it, if he grasps it through some 
lucky turn of fortune, he does not know how much 
it is worth. But if he has made his money himself, 
every dollar of his wealth represents some past effort 
of brain or of body. His life is coined into the dol- 
lars of his capital ; and so his wealth stands for his 
work, and has a larger value than it could for one to 
whom it suggested no past, no accumulation of efforts 
and denials, no sum of thoughts and purposes and 
resolves. So he alone can have a just appreciation 
of to-day who has marked its connection with all 
yesterdays. It is not a separate unit from an aggre- 
gate of parts; it is just a convenient measure of a 
portion of onflowing time, from which it is insep- 
arable. And as the perpetual abode of the soul, — 
for our life is always lived to-day, — it is entitled to 
the highest appreciation. And yet how few of us 
rate to-day at its proper value ! How few see it in 
the dignity it deserves : — 

" Shines the past age, the next with hope is seen, 
To-day shrinks poorly off, unmarked between ; 
Future or past no richer secret folds, 
Oh, friendless present, than thy bosom holds! " 



YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOREVER. 105 



A true intelligence, then, will rate to-day as the 
all-important time, because it is the soul's living 
time. It is never safe, it is never right to under- 
value one's present. Because it is less happy than 
you remember, less generous than you hope for, to- 
day is not the less important or valuable in your life. 
One thing is certain, all your life concentrates here ; 
and here, if ever, must you live. To-day is the time 
for action, and proffers opportunities that never will 
be exactly duplicated. That potent will of yours, 
much as it can do, is never able to affect either past 
or future things. Its sphere is circumscribed to the 
ever-present now. To-day is its only season for ac- 
tivity. And so the whole aim of being should be 
to turn all the realized results of yesterday, and all 
the hopes for to-morrow, into the channels of to-day. 
Let all the resources of life be lavished on the pres- 
ent. Make it good as it can be made. Treat it as so 
much material, so much opportunity placed at your 
disposal to put under the pressure of your will, to 
receive the impress of your character. 

For although we have seen that to-day can never 
escape from yesterday, we must not forget that to-day 
may always modify and change the results of yester- 
day's work. Yesterday furnishes the material of to- 
day's life. It is for to-day to use that material. 
And so the burden of sin which the bitter yesterday 
has handed down to us may be rolled off from the 
soul to-day. The past, indeed, can never be changed ; 
but its results can. Yesterday's work cannot be un- 
done. But to-day's may repair, may alter, may ut- 



106 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



terly transform it. For, in the providence of God, 
the close of one opportunity is the beginning of an- 
other. When yesterday ends, to-day begins. And 
to-day is the eternally open field of opportunity. No 
character is so fixed in the habits of yesterday that 
to-day may not break their thrall. No sin of yester- 
day is so enormous that to-day's repentance may not 
alleviate the throes of remorse, and roll its heavy 
weight from the toiling pilgrim's back. No pros- 
perity is so secure that to-day's mistake or neglect 
may not overturn it. No sorrow of the past is so 
deep that the resolute faith and hope that rise with 
this morning's sun may not dispel it. It is a just 
and considerate compensation by which a loving God 
offsets the power that yesterday wields over to-day, 
by the equal power which to-day has over yesterday. 
No morning, indeed, ever dawns whose skies are not 
painted by the colors that yesterday mixed. But, 
contrariwise, ho storm-clouds ever settled so heavily 
out of yesterday's perturbed atmosphere, that the 
clear currents sweeping down out of the higher 
strata of to-day's life could not blow it across the 
eastern slopes of the sea to make way for sunshine 
and for peace. 

So the rising of the sun of each to-day is an in- 
vitation to every mortal mind to come forward with 
its new schemes and its fresh business. It has a 
cheering yet commanding summons to every heart. 
"Come forth," it says to the men of the axe and the 
plough, "come forth and clear new acres, and lay 
the furrow across new fields. Come forth, ye busy 



YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOREVER. 



107 



builders, and plant new homes, and rear new roofs, 
and span new rivers, and lay your girdling tracks 
through the wilderness lands of the earth. Awake, 
ye schemers for the social good, and plan new routes 
for man's advancement, new agitations for reform, 
new researches in the arts and processes of social 
growth. Here are fresh books to read; here pages in 
experience yet unturned ; here treasured facts await- 
ing study; here enterprises only staying for your 
touch to change them from possibilities to achieve- 
ments. Linger no more, with backward look, think- 
ing of yesterday. Waste not one moment yearning 
for to-morrow's dawn, — 

"Trust no future, howe'er pleasant; 
Let the dead past bury its dead ! 
Act — act in the living present, 
Heart within, and God o'erhead! " 

Ah, friends, it is a noble challenge that each to-day 
makes to our wills ! No night ever yet fell in which 
man could feel that the gates of opportunity were 
shut upon him. No morning ever broke without 
flinging out its cheering signal for new undertak- 
ings. It is a kindling thought, inciting to the 
liveliest endeavors, that to-day may be the date of 
a crisis in life, of some success, some discovery, 
some task accomplished, some consolation found. 
How eagerly Columbus watched and waited for the 
dawn of that new day which was to disclose the low- 
lying coasts of a new world ! How invitingly its 
hours opened, when unknown wonders were to be 



108 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



unfolded, and a fresh contribution made to the 
world's life! So every new to-day breaks upon the 
seeker after truth. He knows that any day may 
bring him to new continents of knowledge. He 
looks on every sunrise as Napoleon on the dawn 
that ushered in the triumph of Austerlitz. If a 
man love his work, he will hail each to-day as it 
throws open the portals of his chosen labor. Michael 
Angelo, true, zealous artist that he was, loved noth- 
ing so much as to be about his work. And so eager 
was he to turn all hours to account, that he would 
sometimes forestall the dawn, and rise to work by 
candlelight. To-day was to him a gift too precious 
to be curtailed of a moment. So will it be to every 
one who understands the dignity, the value, of to- 
day. He will count his hours as a miser his dollars. 
He will reckon each to-day a dividend from the treas- 
ury of time, itself a value to be spent on worthy 
commodities. 

And if a man be living in this spirit, doing to-day's 
work with might and main, turning every energy 
into the moulding of the material the past has yielded, 
into advantages and occasions of triumph over trial, 
he will not weakly lament any past, nor chafe impa- 
tiently for any future. There is a disposition which 
makes a man secure against all the darts of trouble. 
It is a true, submissive, industrious life to-day! It 
is the disposition which colors the day, after all; 
and a cheerful nature will make a better time out of 
a dismal day than a morose heart out of a sunny one. 
If you use to-day aright, it will give you blessings. 



YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOREVER. 109 



As Roman Horace sung, in words that Dryden has 
translated: — 

" Happy the man, and happy he alone, 
He who can call to-day his own; 
He who, secure within, can say, 
'To-morrow, do thy worst, for I have lived to-day!' " 

III. Forever. But there is yet another side to our 
relations to time. To-morrow and all its successors, 
even forever, live in our lives to-day. To-day looks 
forward as well as backward for the elements of its 
life. No man, therefore, has a just view of to-day, 
except as the fprerunner of days to come. It was 
Prince Metternich who said: "The present day has 
no value for me, except as the eve of to-morrow. It 
is always with to-morrow that my spirit wrestles." 
The great diplomat uttered a striking truth. No life 
to-day is worth anything if it be merely for to-day and 
naught else. We shape to-day according to what we 
believe to-morrow will be. And the intensity and 
firmness of a man's belief in to-morrow is the measure 
of the influence it will have on to-day. If we be- 
lieved in no future, the present would wear a very 
different face. For, as Coleridge says, "The spirits 
of great events stride on before the events, and in 
to-day already walks to-morrow." 

It is a poor life, narrow and mean in its aims, in 
its temper, in its works, which looks no farther than 
sunset. For there can be no large plans of life, no 
broad disposition of one's powers, no stimulating am- 
bitions, unless we look beyond to-day, and include 



110 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



many to-morrows in our anticipations. Hope and 
expectation are the springs of the soul's best activ- 
ities. And we cannot live the best life that to-day 
is capable of yielding unless we live as though we 
looked for a certain morrow to carry forward our 
enterprises. Strike out all hope of continuance from 
human life, convince men that they die like gnats, 
with the set of the sun, and you take away the 
strongest incentives to effort. We can bear to feel 
that change will harass, and decay perpetually re- 
model all things. But to believe that through all 
vicissitude nothing remains intact, nothing survives 
to repay our pains, nothing to perpetuate our toil- 
some successes, is to make life not worth the living. 
Living from hand to mouth is not living at all. It 
is barely existing. Until a man begins to live for 
to-morrow, he is not a man, but a child. And he 
has not begun to realize his true spiritual nature 
till he has learned to live for eternity. 

But what do we mean by living for to-morrow? 
How are we to keep up this long-range effort and 
forecasting of thought? Must we put aside the joys 
of to-day in favor of a to-morrow that forever recedes 
before us? Shall we ignore the light that shines 
to-day while we wait for to-morrow's dawn, which 
in turn shall lose its charm as soon as it is come ? 
The proportions of life are not to be enlarged in any 
such way as this. To-day is not dignified, certainly, 
by despising it. We should never accomplish much 
if we forever postponed realization. No, we cannot 
solve the mystery of spiritual living by making eter- 



YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOREVER. Ill 

nity a future thing. It is done b}' feeling that eter- 
nity has begun. That " forever " toward which our 
hearts are yearning, that eternal life into which we 
wrongly suppose that death will usher us, dates from 
to-day. Present time is a part of it. To-day is a 
segment of forever. Eternity is not time to come, 
but only an expression for the endlessness of time 
that now is — time of which yesterday and to-day 
and to-morrow are factors. We are living in eter- 
nity as truly as we ever shall be. Just as each pres- 
ent moment is a part of to-day, so each present to-day 
is a part of forever, a unit in eternity. Did you ever 
think how that future to which you and I are looking 
so wistfully will be, when it arrives, just another 
to-day ? A poet has said : — 

" No mortal ever dreams 
That the scant isthmus he encamps upon 
Between two oceans, one, the stormy, passed, 
And one, the peaceful, yet to venture on, 
Has been that future whereto prophets yearned 
For the fulfilment of earth's cheated hopes; 
Shall be that past which nerveless poets mourn 
As the lost opportunity of song." 

Lowell : The Cathedral. 

And it is equally hard for men to feel that when 
the farthest to-morrow comes which the imagination 
can conceive, it will dawn upon us as to-day has 
dawned, will proffer its opportunities as to-day prof- 
fers them, will call upon our strength and affections, 
will set us fresh tasks. The same laws are in force 
to-day as will be then. The same mighty powers 



112 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



are working to their ends, the same eternal principles 
as have been, and shall be to endless ages. It is a 
fallacy to talk of "passing into eternity," as though 
death were a door, and we went through it into ex- 
istence in some other kind of duration. We are in 
eternity now. And we can begin living for eter- 
nity by simply schooling ourselves to think of life, 
the life we are now living, as a perpetual life, which 
is going on forever. 

When a man thinks that he is likely to live long 
in the place he has chosen for his home, he spares 
no pains to beautify it, and make a comfortable, a 
convenient, a well-appointed abode. So long as he 
thought he was only to live there a little while, he 
did not care to spend either money or labor upon 
a place whose comforts he would enjoy but a brief 
season. Men do not care to put much thought and 
care into the bivouac of a night. But when once the 
feeling of permanence is given to a home, and the 
understanding that it is to be the shelter of many 
years, the disposition grows to fill it with all that 
can beautify and bless. And so, too, when we under- 
stand that this life in which we are living is the life 
in which we are to live forever ; that no vicissitude 
breaks the chain of identity which fastens day unto 
day ; that no convulsion of internal nature will sepa- 
rate the soul from itself — then, I say, we have a 
motive for putting the house of life in order, for 
opening its windows toward the sun, for cleaning 
out its basement and rubbish-rooms, for making it 
warm and light and wholesome. "Know ye not," 



YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOREVER. 113 



said Paul, " that ye are [now, to-day] the temple of 
God?" "Beloved, now are we the sons of God." 
" God hath given unto us eternal life, and this life is 
in his Son. He that hath the Son, hath the life ; he 
that hath not the Son, hath not the life." Brethren, 
is it not time that our houses of life, the abodes of 
selfhood we must forever inhabit, were swept and 
purified, and adorned with righteousness? 

There is a false doctrine of life with which unwise 
teachers try to spur up laggards and restrain wrong- 
doers, by forebodings based on the uncertainty of life. 
"Be wise, be good, be penitent, to-day. To-mor- 
row's sun may never rise ! " It is a complete inver- 
sion of the truth it is meant to teach, thus to play 
upon our knowledge of the uncertainty of physical 
life. We ought rather to warn men to repentance 
and to godly living because of the certainty of life. 
"To-morrow's sun may never rise ! " Oh, fatal error! 
To-morrow's sun is sure to rise. Somewhere and 
somehow it will certainly wake you with its remorse- 
less rays. It is as inevitable as death itself. It will 
find you out and blaze upon you, a loving revelation 
of your righteousness and fidelity, a stern disclosure 
of your weakness and your sin. That dreadful "for- 
ever " is the perpetual menace of wicked souls. For 
it is the sentence which binds them to their own 
corrupt and festering selves. It threatens no lash 
from without, but only the continuity of that con- 
sciousness which is the most irksome, yea, the most 
tormenting agent of retribution. And no man can 
escape its thrall or break its hostile force until he is 



114 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



a penitent before God, returned in humble love to 
his Father's house, doing his duty to his God. But 
when he looks at his life from a lowly and a purified 
heart, " forever " becomes the pledge of joy, the 
assurance of peace, a sacred title to a mansion of 
blessedness. It is a dreadful forever no more, but a 
forever bright with hopes and fulfilments eternally 
renewed. 

Finally, let us cherish the thought, that the whole 
round of life is compassed in these three words of our 
text, "yesterday, to-day, and forever." And it is a 
very simple thing to live aright, if we once get the 
relations and the proportions of our days adjusted 
truly. The past is never lost, and the future is 
always present. Eternity infolds us, and we are 
living under its laws. To-day was once that to- 
morrow toward which we yearned; it will soon be 
yesterday. But remember there is one day that 
never passes. That is to-day ; — for it is always " to- 
day." We live and act only in the present. And 
the time to make both past and future do their work 
for life is in the eternal now. There is blessing in 
the air. It is ours, here and now. God help us, as the 
endless round goes on, to seize the benediction each 
to-day holds out, and treasure it in grateful hearts. 

" Forenoon and afternoon and night ! Forenoon 
And afternoon and night ! Forenoon and — 
What ? The empty song repeats itself ? No more ? 
Yea, that is life. Make this forenoon sublime, 
This afternoon a psalm, this night a prayer, 
And time is conquered, and thy crown is won !" 



THE VICTORY OF THE MEEK. 



115 



THE VICTORY OF THE MEEK. 



Matt. v. 5. — " Blessed are the meek : for they shall inherit the 
earth." 



Meekness is not a quality which stands high in 
the estimation of this world. It belongs to the class of 
virtues which are praised in theory, but mistrusted in 
practice. It might almost be described as fitted only 
for Sunday and pulpit use ; on all other days, and in 
all other places, ignored and scouted as impracticable. 
That is the popular estimate of meekness. And it 
must be added that in the popular view meekness is 
apt to be identified with weakness. It is accounted a 
purely negative trait, a compensating merit in those 
who are denied the more vigorous qualities. But one 
of the last qualities which parents or teachers, or (I 
had almost said) ministers either, set about to develop 
in the young is meekness ; because it is deemed too 
fine and too visionary for daily use. 

But is meekness identical with weakness ? Is it 
this negative, pale, and debilitated trait which nobody 
covets and few acquire? Does it seem as if the 
Saviour would dignify to a place so high among the 



116 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



virtues a quality' which, if it be what many conceive, 
springs from deficient force, and lack of personal 
power? If it be so, then we have in the Saviour's 
words a saying hard indeed to believe. For it is the 
doctrine of our times, taught in every new phrase of 
the current philosophies, that the strongest only sur- 
vive, and the weakest go to the wall. So that, if this 
be the law, it is hard to understand how the meek, if 
they be indeed the weak, are coming into possession 
as heirs of the earth. If strength rules at length, and 
if meekness be weakness, how in the development of 
social organization is the earth ever to fall into the 
hands of the meek? Our insight into the beatitude, 
and our acceptance of the truth it contains, must 
begin at just this point. We seek it first of all in 
the analysis of the word meekness. 

The essential quality of meekness negatives at 
once those conceptions of it which connect it with 
lack of personal force. Meekness is a type of the 
highest sort of moral strength. For meekness means 
self-control and self-abnegation. Your meek man is 
he who has such perfect mastery of himself that he 
can hold himself in subjection to a principle, can put 
his own pride, desire, feeling, one side, and patiently 
endure every hardship to the inner self for the sake 
of his work and his purpose of righteousness. And 
that is the very highest sort of strength. It does not 
mean passivity, but power ; the power hardest in this 
world to acquire — the power to hold self in hand, and 
control the world within in the interests of some great 
truth. Meekness makes itself humble, and so is able 



THE VICTORY OF THE MEEK. 



117 



to submit to injury and provocations. But it bears 
them without resentments, not because it is too weak 
to resist, nor too pusillanimous to feel the hurt, but 
because in comparison with the principle for which it 
endures these pains, they are not deemed worthy of a 
thought. And so meekness cannot be set down as a 
deficiency of strength, but as one form of its greatest 
development. 

You will see by this definition that a weak man 
cannot be a meek man. He lacks the first elements 
of meekness. For he cannot be meek unless he is at 
once sensible of his trials, and able to control himself 
quietly under their stress. If he is too obtuse to 
feel the stings of contempt, of injustice, or of cru- 
elty ; if he is too abject to feel the rising flush of in- 
dignation under wrong ; if he has no pride to battle, 
no self-love to curb, no grasping selfishness to labor 
with — then he may be pliable and inoffensive and 
mild and harmless. But he will not be meek. No 
man bears a cross who does not realize that it is a 
cross. And insensibility, indifference, timidity, are 
not the soil in which true meekness grows. There 
is no meekness about a coward. There is none in a 
sycophant, nor a truckler. There is nothing meek 
about the man who endures injustice or submits to 
a hurt because he is afraid to protest against them. 
That is cowardice, pure and simple, with its roots 
in weakness and unworthy fears. So, then, a meek 
man must be capable of strong passions, and capable 
at the same time of controlling them. 

That is equivalent to saying that the strength of 



118 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



the meek is in the first place the strength of self -con- 
trol. And self-control is the quality which perhaps 
most of all distinguishes the civilized man from the 
uncivilized, the Christian from the natural man. Un- 
tutored manhood, before it has. been through the dis- 
cipline of the years, is incapable of self-government. 
It is impulsive, violent, oppressive. It continually 
oversteps its own rights to invade those of others. 
It is unable to limit itself to the lines of its own 
proper domain. And the whole process of social 
development has been to transform exuberant and 
intractable man, whose nature unfits him to live side 
by side with his fellows, into a self-restrainted and 
well-governed creature, who can live beside other 
men without infringing upon their rights. The 
work is far from completion. The tyrannies, aggres- 
sions, injustices, of the world are by no means erad- 
icated. But something has been done ; and the 
uniform direction of progress has been toward self- 
control, and the limitation of individual life by con- 
sideration for the lives of others. 

When Henry Stanley, after months of exile in the 
heart of the Dark Continent, with none but savages 
for his companions, and none but savage manners be- 
fore his eyes, first met with white men again on the 
banks of the Congo River, the thing which most im- 
pressed him in his white brethren was what seemed 
to him their singular calmness, their self-possession, 
their firm and even poise. They were only ordinary 
whites ; but their bearing was in such marked con- 
trast with the excitability, the childish garrulousness 



THE VICTORY OF THE MEEK. 119 



and frantic gesticulation of his black comrades, that 
they seemed almost like beings from another world. 
And so, indeed, they were. They came from a world 
in which ages of discipline had been lavished to edu- 
cate just such impulsive beings as those blacks into 
the self-governed citizens of civilization. The great 
explorer was receiving in one single impression the 
effect of the long centuries of progress in teaching 
man self-control. The power which had reduced 
the shouts of the savage to the modulated tones of 
the white man, which had modified his uncouth ges- 
ticulations to simple yet forcible gestures, and tamed 
his paroxysms of excitement, rage, or fear to an 
equable temper and reserved demeanor, was the ac- 
cumulated self-control of ages. It was one manifes- 
tation of the strength which makes the modern man 
the master of the savage, — the power of self-control. 

The power which so impressed Mr. Stanley in its 
outward manifestations on the side of behavior 
pushes up to a prominent place in the economy of 
the moral life, and especially in the genesis of the 
Christian virtues. The same power which enables a 
man to control his voice and make simple gestures 
is at the root of his ability to keep his temper and 
refrain from revenge. It is the rule of the higher 
nature over the lower. It is the ascendency of moral 
force. This it is which has taught man to restrain 
his hand from his neighbor's chattel and from his 
neighbor's life. This same control has released the 
bondsman from his slavery. It has conceded the 
rights on which free society subsists, and which un- 



120 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



derlie the greatest states of modern times. It was 
an enlarged self-control on the part of kings, and 
a sense of its necessity to the well-being of society, 
which gained the Magna Charta from the tyrannical 
John. It was a magnificent instance of its still more 
potential sway when Washington put aside the temp- 
tation to use his well-earned power to usurp a nation's 
new-found liberties. It was self-control, again, as it 
affects societies and peoples, which permitted the 
peaceful arbitration of grievances between this nation 
and the mother country. It is upon this same grow- 
ing principle, which sets a limit to the passions, and 
governs them in a more complete dominion with 
each new century, that we base our hopes that the 
nations of Europe will one day adjust their difficul- 
ties without resort to the awful, the needless, the 
savage alternative of war. It becomes strong men 
to be not violent, not overbearing, not tyrannous, 
but meek. And there is an ideal of national inter- 
course toward which the enlightened and Christian 
leaders of every land are straining with eager desire, 
which can rest on no other basis than this one of a 
social, yes, a political, meekness, whose chief trait 
is enlightened self-control. 

But more than this, a further analysis of meekness 
reveals the fact that it rests upon the power which 
begets and is begotten by self-abnegation. And self- 
abnegation never }^et occurred in a weak nature. It 
is a characteristic of none but the strongest souls. 
To magnify self ; to grasp all and give nothing ; to 
think of self first ; to work for self always — these are 



THE VICTORY OF THE MEEK. 



121 



characteristics of man in his earliest stages, as babe 
and child in individual life, as savage in the life of 
the race. It is only with time and with the growth 
of his moral nature that he learns how to give up, to 
sacrifice, to forget self in the good of some person or 
some great cause. And when he rises to an act of 
pure self-sacrifice, he scales the heights of noblest 
being, and does the greatest thing humanity can pos- 
sibly compass. For in the experiences which lead up 
to self-sacrifice, man discovers his own greatest worth 
to himself and to his fellows ; and he puts the stamp 
of that high value upon his soul when he gives him- 
self without reserve in the acts of sacrifice, and writes 
himself down as nothing in comparison with the cause 
for which he goes forth. Abraham Lincoln, standing 
on the hills of Gettysburg to dedicate the soldiers' 
cemetery, said in words which will live forever, " The 
world will little note nor long remember what we 
say here, but it can never forget what they did here." 
But what immortalized the men who on that memor- 
able field yielded up their lives for the land was their 
entire surrender of self to the cause and the nation for 
which they stood in their places and welcomed peril, 
suffering, wounds, or death. And to be standing there 
in the very front and edge of the battle's dangers ; 
to have relinquished home ; to have parted from wife, 
children, friends ; to have given a quit-claim to life, 
if the fate of war should foreclose — that was not the 
act of weaklings ! It took the strength of manhood's 
best life to do it ! To unclasp the fingers from the 
life-treasures to which they cling with the closest and 



122 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



the fondest hold, to count these all as naught when 
weighed in the balance against the country's welfare, 
the freeman's rights, the appeal of truth, the good of 
suffering men, — this is the glory of self-abnegation ; 
and it is the crowning test of strength. When a 
man's soul will bear that strain without breaking, 
there is no questioning his inner strength. He may 
never be canonized, but he is fit to be. For he has 
followed the shining form of Him who in this same 
spirit toiled up the green slopes of Calvary to give 
His life a ransom for many. 

In its two leading characteristics, then, meekness 
turns out to be not weakness, but strength; not the 
negative mildness of the craven or the milksop, but 
the strong self-restraint of the most vigorous na- 
tures, the self-abnegation of the most stout-hearted. 
This is the true picture of meekness. He who draws 
it with the tame lineaments, the shambling gait, the 
apologetic bearing of servility and meanness, mistakes 
his subject. That is not meekness. For meekness 
always implies something held in subjection, some- 
thing kept under the curb. And here there never 
was anything worth curbing. The beauty of meek- 
ness lies in the fact that it is the docility, the quies- 
cence, of a soul thoroughly submissive to the divine 
will, and utterly emptied of the weakening and 
the distracting elements of selfishness. But it is 
the humility of the strong, and not the servility of ' 
the feeble. 

Moreover, we shall not be entirely prepared to 
understand how meekness can ever come into the 



THE VICTORY OF THE MEEK. 



123 



mastery of this world, unless we remember, not only 
that it is begotten out of strength, but also that it 
begets strength. No man ever learns to put forth 
his full moral strength in any enterprise, whether 
it is to reform a criminal or to convert a nation, 
until he has first learned meekness, the art of sinking 
himself in the work he has to do. Whoever would 
call out all there is within him, whoever would 
summon all his reserves of strength into the work 
he is doing, must first be able to say sincerely, " Let 
me be nothing, but let my work be everything." 
And that makes a meek man. When Lincoln, in 
the face of popular clamor and personal insult and 
injustice, surrendered the rebel commissioners taken 
from an English ship, he showed the superlative 
value of meekness as a means to the largest exercise 
of strength. For had pride, or personal resentment, 
or any of the paralyzing passions which obstruct 
the workings of small minds, beclouded his judg- 
ment or overruled it, he never could have made the 
bold, strong move which averted foreign war and 
set the nation right in the eyes of the world. It was 
his meekness that cleared the way for the fullest 
exercise of his great strength. It was a mark of 
his marvellous character. Once when he was confer- 
ring with friends who were seeking to persuade him 
to a course for which he did not believe the country 
was ready, the president urged them In turn to go 
home, agitate, rouse the public mind, create a strong 
sentiment, and make the nation ready to sustain him 
when he should act. But the character of the man 



124 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



never flashed out more clearly than when he clinched 
his exhortation by saying, " Do not be afraid of 
hurting me. Do not spare me at all." There spoke 
the true meekness of the man. He was ready to 
be offered up by his own friends, if only the cause 
might gain, and the struggle be brought a little 
nearer to its righteous end. Who does not see how 
meekness contributes to strength in clearing away all 
those hampering weights of selfishness which weaken 
the blows we would strike, and diminish the force 
of our actions by the intrusions of our own egotism. 

If these conclusions in regard to meekness be just, 
we find it relieved of much of that odium and con- 
tempt with which, in the common mind, it seems to 
be invested. It is a little easier, too, to see how 
meekness may ally itself with strength, and so per- 
haps, after all, be able to assert some claim on the 
world-inheritance which science tells us is to fall 
only to -the strong. And in pursuance of that 
thought, it is no more than just to add that there is 
nothing in meekness inconsistent with that aggres- 
siveness which is an invariable element of success 
and of conquest. Meekness is not passivity. It 
does not mean indolence, indifference, quiescence. 
It does not even mean non-resistance to wrong. A 
man may be meek without being inert. He may 
suffer personal wrong without resentment, and still 
utter the protest of conscience against the evil by 
which he suffers. We wrong a noble trait when we 
conceive of it as in any wise debarring men from 
those noble struggles for good, warfares against an- 



THE VICTORY OF THE MEEK. 



125 



cient wrongs, conflicts with adversities, which fall to 
the lot of every man, and in which it is every man's 
great glory to conquer. There is nothing to debar a 
meek man from the struggle for existence, and noth- 
ing about his meekness to imperil his chances of suc- 
cess. The great prototype of meekness, he who was 
called the meekest among all the sons of men, was 
one of the most aggressive, energetic, and positive 
leaders the world ever saw. The fame of Moses will 
always rank him among the warriors for righteous- 
ness, the uncompromising friend of good, and foe of 
evil. He never failed to protest against an evil, to 
make war upon the evil-doer, to struggle with all 
corruptions and errors of his age. Yet he carried 
through all that long life of battle such a lowly 
heart, so humble, so thoughtless of self, so patient 
under chastisement, that posterity has acquiesced in 
the old verdict, which extols his meekness. And 
was not he who pronounced the great beatitude, and 
prophesied the ultimate rule of the meek in the 
earth, that same Jesus who declared that he came 
not to bring peace on earth, but a sword. Indeed, 
the meek men of this world have frequently been its 
most aggressive. They have been the ones who have 
attacked great wrongs, intrenched in old custom and 
the selfishness of man ; they have been the martyrs 
who upheld the new faith of the cross in its earliest 
encounters ; they have been the reformers, uprooting 
abuses and demanding new rights for humanity; they 
have been the little band of the faithful, patient and 
persistent under adversity and persecution, who have 



126 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



carried many a forlorn hope in religion through its 
dark hours, and commanded for it a respect and toler- 
ance at last. Indeed, there are no fighters in this 
world like your meek men ; because they strive law- 
fully, without anger or blinding resentments, and lose 
themselves in the end they have in view so utterly 
that no sacrifice nor hardship nor personal injury 
seems too hard to bear for the sake of the thing they 
would do. And when they die, a power goes forth 
out of their spirits which inflames the hearts of men 
everywhere, and rallies new converts, and strengthens 
the armies of righteousness, and conquers all the ages. 
Almost everywhere, in the great regenerative move- 
ments of society, you will find some meek man or 
woman, whose meekness has found its proper fruit in 
self-control and self-abnegation, whose determination, 
whose courage, whose resolute aggressiveness, give 
life and strength to all his associates, and feed the 
flagging fires of their faith. 

It is a comfort and a reassurance to our Christian 
prepossessions to find a confirmation of the Saviour's 
blessing and approval of the meek in the course of 
external nature. There, where the law seems to be 
invariable that mildness and unselfishness have no 
chance, and that the weakest invariably goes to the 
wall, men usually find reasons for doubting or for 
disbelieving in the principles of the Sermon on the 
Mount. Yet at this very point the philosophers of 
broader range have already indicated the fact that ev- 
olution is proceeding along just the lines indicated by 
the Saviour's precepts. The law of natural selection, 



THE VICTORY OF THE MEEK. 127 

which governs the lower world with sway almost ab- 
solute, loses its hold when it reaches man. Other 
influences have begun to operate. The universal 
struggle for existence, having produced the human 
soul, is about to cease. The warfares of men are 
materially diminished. Milder manners every year 
become more widely practised. More consideration 
is continually being shown to the weak. There is a 
universal tempering, in the human race, of the asperi- 
ties of intercourse, the harsher features of character, 
the selfishness and hatreds of the past. The type of 
the coming man is not hard to determine. Put the 
heroes of the nineteenth century beside those of two 
or four thousand years ago, and you mark the direc- 
tion in which the type has already changed. Then the 
popular hero was he who had slain his hundreds or his 
thousands, — some Caesar fresh from his Gallic wars, 
some Cyrus or some Saul. Always it was the man 
of heavy hand and heart of iron, the warrior, the 
conqueror with his armies. But to-day men save 
their best laurels for those who, when they fight, 
strive to save strife, and put an end to war. This 
nation would not hold its great commander Grant in 
such high esteem if his courage had not been tem- 
pered with such great clemency, and if he had not 
shown that the only reason he made war was to 
found a lasting peace. Measure Gladstone or Lin- 
coln with Xerxes or with Alaric, and you will see 
the vast growth of men's ideals toward the models 
of the Sermon on the Mount. And if this be the 
tendency of human growth, it is not difficult to un- 



128 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



derstand that in the fulness of time this earth will be 
in the control of those who will rule it, not with 
the strong hand of selfish force, but with the mild 
yet effectual rule of the meek. And so the prophe- 
cies of science confirm the affirmation of our Lord, 
" The meek shall inherit the earth." 

Indeed, that is all foreshadowed in the prospective 
triumph of Christianity. The broadening borders of 
the gospel kingdom will never finally be drawn till 
they include the earth, till the kingdoms of this earth 
become the kingdoms of God's Son. And the increas- 
ing sway of Christianity is not the victory of force, of 
pride, of coarse, brutal might, of the sword and the 
cannon ; it is the sway of those milder forces personi- 
fied in Jesus the Christ. We read that, in spite of 
his exalted rank among men, "he humbled himself, 
and became obedient unto death, even unto the death 
of the cross. Wherefore God also hath highly exalted 
him, and given him a name which is above every 
name : that at the name of Jesus every knee should 
bow, of things in heaven and things in the earth, 
and things under the earth ; and that every tongue 
should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory 
of God the Father." That is the assured triumph of 
our Lord. In every sense of the word it is and shall 
be the victory of the meek. 



IMMORTAL LIFE AND ETERNAL LIFE. 129 



IMMORTAL LIFE AND ETERNAL LIFE. 



John xi. 26. — " Whosoever liveth and belie veth in me shall never 
die." 



Strange words those to address to sorrowing and 
stricken mourners in the first bitterness of a loving 
grief ! They are mysterious and blind. They seem 
at first to contain a mere paradox, and nothing more. 
But Jesus Christ never dealt in empty phrases. His 
words always cover the profoundest meanings. They 
are never words that darken counsel. But when we 
search out their inner sense, and find the truth they 
hide, it is always some deep and vital principle of 
spiritual life. There are many of Jesus' words which 
have to be seen from the inside of the Christian life 
in order to be understood. They are like the win- 
dows of some splendid cathedral. You look at these 
windows from the street, and they are dull, almost 
colorless, heavy and dark. But go inside the walls, 
stand in nave or transept, and then look, and they are 
bright and radiant with the symbols of faith and of 
holy thoughts. So the words of our Saviour never 
appear to us in all their power and meaning until we 



130 



THE LEISURE OF GOB. 



look at them from within the walls of the Christian's 
house of life. And having once seen their transcen- 
dent beauty and significance, one can never in the 
world doubt them. 

These words especially deserve the study and the 
thought of our own times. We have fallen on an age 
in the world's life which has lost somewhat of the sim- 
ple faith in life beyond death which marked the early 
church. We are in a season of uncertainty and doubt. 
Men have learned so many new facts that their con- 
fidence in some of the old ones is becoming shaken. 
They do not feel so sure of any belief as they once 
did of all their beliefs. They want an argument for 
immortality which will amount to a demonstration, 
and there can no such argument be given them. 
They seek for evidences in the realm of the senses, — 
manifestations, signs, messages, from the unseen world 
to this. But clearly these are not evidences that can 
stand alone, but have in their turn to be attested. So 
it happens that there is a great searching of hearts 
and understandings over the soul's continuing life 
after death. There is abundant doubt, but there is 
also a vast preponderance of faith. Some old reasons 
for faith have been lost, but new ones have come to 
hand which are 3 7 et stronger. There can be no ulti- 
mate harm in this temporary upsetting. The truth is 
sure to stand the more firmly in the end. It may be 
obscured for a time. It is sure to shine the clearer at 
last. Indeed, there is something reassuring about this 
questioning process now going on. We are more 
likely to get at the truth by honest questions than we 



IMMORTAL LIFE AND ETERNAL LIFE. 131 



are by a stupid and unreasoning silence. Anybody 
who would rather have the faith of ignorance than 
the faith of knowledge is hopelessly out of sympathy 
with God's methods of revelation. For he who would 
have us " prove all things " desires us only to " hold 
fast that which is good." I look on the intellectual 
unrest and doubt of to-day as the harbinger of a 
stronger faith and a more profound spiritual peace 
than ever has prevailed in the world. Let no man 
hesitate to go deep down to the very foundations of 
the truth. They are more secure than the everlasting 
hills. There are some things about our Christianity 
" which cannot be shaken." 

But there is one great fact which is almost utterly 
overlooked by this generation in its search for reli- 
gious truth, and especially in its search for a stronger 
faith in immortality. I mean the preparation of the 
mind to receive the truth. That is a part of the 
process just as necessary as the discovery of facts or 
principles which attest the truth. The discovery of 
a vein of coal or of gold means nothing whatever to 
the man who does not know the value of either min- 
eral, or its relation to human life and progress. You 
might have let an ignorant man look through Lever- 
rier's telescope and see all that the great astronomer 
ever saw ; but he would never connect the disturb- 
ances of the planets with the appearance of Neptune, 
prophesying a new world from the perturbations of 
the old ones. To judge of the value of evidence, 
to perceive the bearing and the force of signs and 
reasons and indications, demands some familiarity, 



132 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



some training and preparation in the field of thought 
where the matters lie which are understudy. A man 
who has spent all his life studying the earth in the 
galleries of a coal-mine is not the sort of a person 
whose opinion you want in reference to the indica- 
tions of the weather from the clouds. 

It is here that we meet one of the great difficulties 
of our age. One of the grand reasons for the unbe- 
lief of our time is the failure of men and women 
to understand and rightly value the evidences of the 
life after death. Our generation has been brought 
up with its eyes fixed on the earth. What it sees 
there it appreciates and understands. It can tell 
what soil is good for what crops. It can point out 
the indications of mineral wealth, of gold and silver, 
of coal and oil, of copper and salt. It can draw you 
the lines in which trade will move, and prophesy 
where the most money is to be made. It can stake 
out states and territories, and import vast popula- 
tions to fill them. It has contrived to master some 
of the most gigantic forces of the universe. It has 
done more than hitch its wagon to a star ; for it 
has fastened that wagon to the tremendous force that 
sweeps over all stars and systems, and makes the 
universal electric fluid light its cities and drag its 
street-cars. 

But all this it does without ever lifting its eyes 
from the ground. Every one of these discoveries, 
inventions, devices, in which our age is so expert, is 
of the earth, earthy. The training which has fitted 
men for all they have achieved in the nineteenth cen- 



IMMORTAL LIFE AND ETERNAL LIFE. 133 



tury is precisely the kind of training which gives no 
help at all in the larger and more wonderful field 
of moral and spiritual truth. We sometimes deplore 
the scepticism of science, as if it were something 
against religion that the scientific people, the astron- 
omers, the chemists, the biologists, and the botanists, 
are so slow to believe in the truths of the faith. 
Some time ago the editor of a well-known religious 
journal sent out a letter to scores of scientific men, 
asking them if they thought that science had estab- 
lished anything forbidding the belief in immortality. 
There was no objection to his taking that sort of tes- 
timony ; but nevertheless it was much as if he had 
written to a hundred coal-miners to inquire if they 
knew of anything in their business to forbid the ex- 
pectation that we may sometime take photographs 
in colors. It was like asking a farmer whether he 
thinks the ocean may be crossed in four days. The 
expert in one field has no necessary fitness for others. 
The exclusive attention of men to purely physical 
facts unfits them to be judges of spiritual facts. A 
man who has all his life studied nothing but the or- 
ganism of the body is by that very fact unfitted to 
pronounce upon the life of the soul. 

How, then, can we look for any stronger faith in 
the life of the soul, when men are so absorbed in the 
life of the body ? What hope have we of impressing 
men's minds with the evidences of the continuing 
life of the soul, until we can draw their thoughts and 
their attention to the life of the spirit within them, 
as that goes on now and here ? What would be the 



134 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



advantage of more proofs of immortality, when we 
are not in a frame of mind to feel the force of those 
we already have ? The most serious root of what- 
ever doubt and uncertainty exist as to man's life 
beyond the grave comes from our feeble sense of his 
spiritual essence and the life of his soul this side 
of death. The great foe of our faith in the immor- 
tal world is not science. It is worlclliness. All the 
scientific discoveries and all the scientific tracts 
cannot work such havoc with this faith as the 
living of a life of carnality, of worldly pleasure, 
of absorption in business cares. Life here in Amer* 
ica, for example, is moulded not so much by the 
scientific books in the libraries and the homes, as 
by the market reports, the passion for money, the 
craze for social prominence. Our people are im- 
mersed in the love of this world. They have no 
time nor care for thoughts of any other. They hurry 
through life with their eyes bent fast upon the earth 
beneath their feet, upon the hurrying forms of flesh 
and blood which crowd around them. They treat 
one another as rivals, as investors, as traders, as 
customers, as clients, as constituents, as people with 
something to give or get for this life and this world 
alone. How seldom does the thought of the spiritual 
relations or interests of this great multitude find 
expression in its life and its ideals ! We are living 
a daily life that is crowded to the uttermost with 
earth and earthiness. What wonder that when death 
thrusts itself across our pathway we are aghast at 
a presence which annihilates all that has stood to us 



IMMORTAL LIFE AND ETERNAL LIFE. 135 



for life, and makes valueless all the things we have 
counted the prizes of life ; what wonder that we have 
no resources with which to meet its awful inroads on 
our affections and our faith ! A man must have some 
sense of the soul and its worth before he can believe 
in its continuous life. He must have some realization 
of the higher life that is going on within us before 
he can be expected to believe in its existence after 
the body has been dropped. How can he believe 
in that which has become to him but little more 
than a name ? 

For this belief in the future life is not a faith that 
can be based on creeds or arguments, or taken second- 
hand by inheritance or by transmission. You may 
repeat a formula that states it. You may link to- 
gether a series of arguments which prove it. You 
may hold it in an outward and formal way, as you hold 
a belief in the rotundity of the earth. But to have a 
true and a satisfying sense of the soul's immortality 
needs more than this. Such a faith, as another has 
well said, " must be achieved." There must be a 
sense in yourself of yourself ; and that sense can only 
come with and by the dawning of spiritual powers 
"and affections within us. " Join thyself," said Augus- 
tine, " to the eternal God, and thou shalt be eternal." 
" Just in the degree in which we attain height of 
spiritual nature," says Dr. Munger, " are we able to 
predicate immortality of ourselves. It is not a thing 
to be announced by any 4 lo here ' or ' lo there,' but is 
within us, the fruit of faith, the achievement of spirit- 
ual endeavor," You can never make a man feel the 



136 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



principles of the fine arts, of painting, for example, or 
of sculpture, by assertion and by description. There 
is no such thing as a second-hand imparting of the 
sense of beauty, the perception of aims and motives, 
the discrimination of means and methods which make 
up the artist's work. No man can have any possible 
idea of the meaning or of the methods of art until he 
has studied pictures, lived among them, watched the 
making of them, learned the spirit and the purposes 
of the artists who make them — in short, lived in an 
artistic atmosphere, and become imbued with artistic 
life. Neither can you make a man feel the reality of 
the immortal part of human nature, and its essen- 
tial deathlessness, until you have induced him to live 
for his soul, and not for his body. As long as the 
physical life and all its associations fill his mind and 
absorb his attention, so long he will have small out- 
look into the life which transcends the physical. 

When the astronomer undertakes to study the true 
place and relations of the globe on which we live, and 
learn all he can about its position in space, its move- 
ments and its connection with other celestial bodies 
and systems, he can do but little of his work in the 
day. The sun, pouring out its brilliant rays, is 
reflected from every particle of matter it illumines, 
and brings out every hue earth is capable of show- 
ing ; and in the blaze of light and color the farther 
heavens are lost to sight. There is a curtain of bright 
beams, a mist of sunshine which obscures the vision 
of the student of the heavens. He must wait until 
the sun has set, and this deluge of reflected rays has 



IMMORTAL LIFE AND ETERNAL LIFE. 137 



subsided. When the glare of the earth on which he 
stands is out of his eyes, he can begin his researches. 
Then the stars come out. Then the heavens deepen 
before his gaze. Then he discovers his true place, 
and marks the path of his planet-home among the 
other orbs. Then this earth, which seemed before to 
be all there was, now appears but a pin-point in space 
and a dwarf among giant worlds. The whole scene 
has changed, and with it all the inferences he may 
draw from it. The stars were all there before, but he 
could not see them because the conditions were not 
right. 

So it is of the soul's sense of its own relations to 
life, to things eternal and deathless. As long as this 
world and its life are illuminated too strongly, noth- 
ing else is seen, nothing else felt. The glare of this 
world is in our eyes, and no other world seems real to 
us. If we would see our actual place and estate in 
life we must move to that hemisphere of experience 
and of thought where the glitter of the world and the 
flesh fades away, and all the garish light of these lower 
passions is quenched. Then the everlasting stars, 
the landmarks of our path down the eternities, shine 
down upon us in their splendor. Then we see the 
immensity of life, and all life means to us , and then 
we feel most of all how impossible a thing it is that 
that life should be quenched in the dissolution of the 
flesh, and go out when soul and body part company. 

Here, then, is the explanation of Christ's words to 
the stricken sisters of Bethany, "Whosoever liveth 
and belie veth in me shall never die." " Whosoever 



138 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



liveth." You must be alive in order to know what 
deathlessness is. Begin to live as a soul, and not as 
an animal, if you want to be rid of the fear of death 
and the doubt of immortality. The way out of the 
doubts and fears which oppress us is not altogether 
by the gate of knowledge or of logic, but by the 
avenues of the spirit. We do not need more facts, 
but a better feeling. To those who already share 
the divine life the terrors of death are abolished. Its 
inevitable wrench to the spirit is mostly overcome, 
and its change no more than from life to life. If 
you are acquainted with your soul, if you have 
learned to live already with the immortal part of 
you, and to take pleasure in the things which min- 
ister to the life of that part of you, you will not 
deem it such a lonesome, blank, and unbearable 
thing to go away with your self, your real self, 
even out of this body into some other. But you 
must be something more than "dead in trespasses 
and sins," something more than choked with "the 
cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches," 
before this thought can be realized in you. You 
must have a spirit that is not corrupted with the 
taint of money. You must be above the standards 
of fashion and society. You must be free from the 
lusts of the body, and the passions which canker 
through the flesh into the very substance of the 
soul. Because all these things mean the absorp- 
tion of your nature in things which death will 
absolutely cut off. " How much did he leave ? " 
asked somebody about a millionnaire who had just 



IMMORTAL LIFE AND ETERNAL LIFE. 139 



died. " Everything," was the answer ; " he didn't 
take a cent with him." If a man lives on earth so 
that when he goes away from earth he has to leave 
"everything" that made up his life, his activities, 
his pleasures, then death means an awful experi- 
ence of loss, of privation, of shrinkage. You can- 
not carry your money with you, nor jouy fashionable 
follies, nor your luxuries, nor your amusements. If 
these are all your life consists in, then you are not 
living in the sense that Jesus meant, and death must 
be a real, a terrible, a frightful fact to you. It is no 
wonder that they who have given themselves to these 
perishable things, shrink and shudder in the face of 
that event which parts them from their idols ! 

But "whosoever liveth," he shall never die. He 
whose real life consists not " in the abundance of the 
things that he possesseth ; w he whose spirit is sus- 
tained and fed by streams of love ; he who lives in 
faith on all the divine tilings ; he who works out his 
faith in pure conduct, exalted aims, unselfish pur- 
poses, affectionate service to others, — that man does 
not die in death. Death only sets free for larger 
activity the soul which has already begun its undy- 
ing developments. 

Are you troubled, friend, by the fear of death? 
Do you shrink from the great change ? Is the grave 
a deep pit to you ? Is it the gate of terrors and the 
frontier of a land of doubts ? There is a way to 
abolish all these grim fears and saddening doubts. 
Christ has taught us how we may despoil the great 
spoiler, conquer the conqueror, light up the valley of 



140 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



shadows. It is by living in him, in his Spirit, by his 
power. Early was it said by one who knew the power 
of the Holy Ghost in his own life, " The sting of 
death is sin." But since Christ gives us the victory 
over sin, he takes away thereby the sting of death, 
and makes the way to the grave one bright and shin- 
ing path of life. 

" And wherefore should I seek above 
Thy city in the sky, 
Since firm in faith and deep in love 
Its broad foundations lie. 

Since in a life of peace and prayer, 
Nor known on earth nor praised, 

By humblest toil, by ceaseless care, 
Its holy towers are raised. 

Where faith the soul hath purified, 

And penitence hath shriven, 
And truth is crowned and glorified, 

There, only there, is heaven!" 

But we have to note, finally, how Jesus connects 
this removal of doubts and fears about death with 
belief on himself. " Whosoever liveth and believeth 
in me," is his word. There came with him into the 
world a certainty and a comfort in regard to death 
which the world had never known before. Men may 
range over all the proofs of immortality, and single 
out what seem to them the strongest or the most 
comforting ; but, after all, the fact remains that the 
world got its most marked and abiding impulse 
toward this faith out of the life and spirit of Jesus 
Christ. No amount of special pleading can ever do 



IMMORTAL LIFE AND ETERNAL LIFE. 141 

away with the real relation which exists between the 
coming of Jesus and the advent of a larger, firmer 
faith in life after death. 

And why should this not be the most natural thing 
in the world ? If it be true, as we have been trying 
to see, that our clear vision of this great reality de- 
pends upon our own spiritual integrity, why should 
not the purest soul that ever lived have seen most 
clearly the whole truth about the soul and its con- 
tinuing life ? Is it likely that Christ was mistaken ? 
Could his faith have been misled? Did the illu- 
mination which filled him in every other matter fail 
him here ? The centuries have searched in vain for 
a flaw in his morals, his great doctrines about God 
and man and life and spiritual law. He stands un- 
impeached in all ; and the accumulating years but 
add new force to his authority, new weight to all 
his words. Can it be possible that in this teaching, 
which is assumed in all else that he taught, he has 
been groping in the dark like the rest of us? Is 
his strong affirmation of immortality only the utter- 
ance of a hope, the guess of a visionary, the illusion 
of a limited and human mind ? Receive that if you 
can. But if you can doubt the sight of the clearest 
eye that ever swept the horizon of this life, and 
saw at its extremest edge the blue land-line of the 
heavenly country, remember that you violate one 
of the most accepted laws of common-sense. For 
nothing is better established in the minds of reason- 
able men than that it is safe to take the testimony of 
experts, and believe in the judgments of the wisest. 



142 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



" It is wisdom," sa}^s another, " to see with the wise 
and to feel with the good." And to those of us who 
believe in the revelation of God in Christ, and who 
see the Father's mind in his, there can be but one 
feeling. If Jesus said that we are to live on after 
death, we have no right to doubt it. We believe on 
him; therefore, when death comes to us, it shall be 
no more death, but the herald of life. 

It was on a warm spring evening, as the hours 
drew on to the midnight, that there came through 
the poet's open window the strident cry of the wild- 
fowl, winging their way northward. And that strange 
sound borne in on the night wind suggested to his 
mind the lines that Bryant once wrote, full of this 
calm trust which grows with the expanding soul. 

" Whither midst falling dew, 

While glow the heavens with the last steps of day, 
Far through their rosy depths dost thou pursue 
Thy solitary way ? 



There is a Power whose care 

Teaches thy way along that pathless coast, 
The desert and illimitable air — 

Lone wandering, hut not lost. 

Thou'rt gone, the abyss of heaven 

Hath swallowed up thy form ; yet on my heart 
Hath deeply sunk the lesson thou hast given, 

And shall not soon depart. 

He who from zone to zone 

Guides through the sky thy certain flight, 
In the long way that I must tread alone 

Will lead my steps aright." 



JUDGMENT OF DIVINE THINGS. 



143 



THE PKEMATURE JUDGMENT OF DIVINE 
THINGS. 



1 Cor. iv. 5. — " Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the 
Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of dark- 
ness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts; and then 
shall every man have praise of God." 



These words of Paul had in view a specific and 
particular event and its results. They point to the 
coming of Jesus in visible form and outward power, 
which was unquestionably the expectation of his 
apostles, within their own generation. In his earlier 
letters, at least, Paul shares this belief; and at the 
time he wrote our text he was, like his fellow-men, 
in expectancy of an immediate appearing of the 
Lord, in power and glory, to right the wrongs of the 
groaning world, to judge the evil-doer, and reward 
the righteous, to make an end of sin, and begin the 
eternal reign of righteousness. In his later thought 
he seems to have discarded that portion of his belief 
which localized and appointed a date for the Lord's 
coming-, and to have better understood the meaning 
of Jesus' prediction concerning his advent. But 



144 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



while he cherished this non-essential misconstruc- 
tion of Christ's words, he was permitted to see the 
grand fact which he never ceased to teach, that in 
the fulness of time the day should come when the 
hidden things of life, its mysteries and its perver- 
sities, all the conflict of good and of ill, should be 
unfolded, explained, and cleared up, and all made to 
attest the glory and the goodness of the Father. 

That is the thought of our text. And the lesson 
which is drawn from this truth is that men ought 
not to prejudge the work of God. The moral creation 
is not finished, but progressing. Its walls are still 
rising. Its towers still bear the scaffolding of the 
toil which carries it forward. And Paul's injunction 
is, "Wait. Do not judge the work till it is finished. 
Remember how much will develop as the toil goes on. 
Consider the things yet remaining undone which will 
change the aspect of the whole. Wait patiently, and 
be sure that the issue of this moral universe shall 
redound to the glory of God." 

Centuries have passed since those wise and inspired 
words were uttered. And still there is need, as this 
advent season returns, which reminds us of the delib- 
erate pace at which the work of creation's perfection 
goes on, that we repeat these words of the great 
apostle to our hearts. We need to urge that thought 
upon the doubting spirits of the day, whose unbelief 
is darkened by so much gloom, and even despair. We 
must teach it to our own impatient hearts. We must 
use it as a prop to faith and a foregleam of knowl- 
edge. Life is not to be judged by its present aspects. 



JUDGMENT OF DIVINE THINGS. 



145 



The present can never be properly estimated if taken 
by itself. All things are to be interpreted in the 
light of their results, their final issue, their culmi- 
nation. Creation is not to be treated like a finished 
cathedral, whose details are all done ; much less like 
a crumbling ruin, whose disintegration has begun. 
It is to be viewed rather as one looks at the life and 
interests of the expanding city or the undeveloped 
nation. It is not done, but doing. Its promises are 
as yet far greater than its fulfilments. It must be 
clothed in the beams of hope. For time will prove 
the groundlessness of misgivings and fears. The 
outcome of it all will satisfy yearning hearts. And 
the labor of every honest soul toward the grand result 
will "have praise of God." 

I. There is no truth, let it be said, which needs 
a more vigorous enforcement upon the pessimists 
of our day than this general principle of our text. 
There is no answer to their complaints and criti- 
cisms about the creation except in this truth. There 
is full answer to them in its leading thought. 
The great mistake of those who seek to undermine 
the belief in benevolent Power presiding over the 
creation, is in treating this world as if it were a 
finished product, its aims all fully developed, its 
resources all laid bare, its development only a cir- 
cular progress, in which experience repeats itself, 
and no more. But if anything may be regarded as 
well established in fact as well as in faith, it is the 
scientific doctrine that this is a creation in process of 
evolution. It is a growing crop, a web in the loom, 



146 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



a tale half told, a picture but just sketched in. And 
even those who refuse to admit that creation shows 
any signs of intelligence will allow that the bearing 
and influence of things present on one another can- 
not be well understood until they have worked out 
to their results in some future time. And if it be 
conceded that there may after all be an intelligent 
purpose in nature, a plan by which all things are 
working, then by so much the more must we per- 
petually hold judgment in suspense upon some parts 
of this present life. 

When an artist has projected a great picture, when 
he has completed all his studies,, conceived his plan, 
and decided upon his methods, he proceeds to make 
his preliminary sketches. He roughly draws his 
various figures, in such postures and with such gen- 
eral expression as he means them to have in the 
canvas where he will finally place them. They are 
roughly done at first, and, taken by themselves, 
suggest no adequate notion of what the general 
composition will be. Perhaps he even paints each 
sketch with some elaboration. But even then it 
would be impossible to make a fair estimate of any 
of these carefully studied figures, or pronounce upon 
their coloring; because in the mind of the artist 
every one of these details has a definite relation to 
every other ; and neither face nor figure, outline nor 
coloring, can be understood, except as it is thought 
of in connection with all the rest. So the real value 
of all these separate particulars cannot be estimated 
alone. But when the artist begins to draw them 



JUDGMENT OF DIVINE THINGS. 



147 



in together, when he groups these sketches on one 
surface, when he blends the colors, and combines 
them in relation to the lights and shadows of the 
picture, then one may begin to see, and not till then, 
all that the studies contained. They can only be 
interpreted by their final combination, their place 
in the finished picture. 

Or take an illustration still more analogous to the 
case we are seeking to make plain, because it is a 
part of a scheme which is never finished, but always 
going on as long as the merchant does business : let 
any man of affairs undertake some large and compli- 
cated enterprise of profit, like the improvement of a 
great estate, or, we will say, the building of an exten- 
sive railroad line. Now, in order to make a fair judg- 
ment of the various steps of that work, it is necessary 
always to keep in mind its end. There are many 
stages in the progress of the enterprise when it 
seemed more like a work of demolition than one of 
construction. The claims upon public and private 
lands for location, the cutting away of forests, the 
digging down of hills, the rendering of property 
unfit for its old uses, — all these seem like undoing 
and depreciating and destroying. The debt, too, 
incurred for construction, the mortgages given on 
this newly made property, is it not a thriftless use 
of money to put it into this highway in a wilder- 
ness ? Is it wise to undertake all these risks, expend 
all this treasure, devote all this thought, care, anx- 
iety? Well, the one answer of the capitalist, of the 
engineer, of the managers of the scheme, is simply, 



148 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



"Wait and see." You must wait till you see these 
untenanted fields taken up by the thronging immi- 
grants. You must wait till these streams begin to 
pull at the wheels of factories, these plains to turn 
yellow with the ripening grain, these scattering 
settlements to grow to hamlets and towns and thriv- 
ing cities. You must wait till the heavy-laden 
trains toil across the country with great freights of 
produce, and come back bearing the supplies for these 
fresh communities. That is the answer to all your 
queries. That proves that the work was one of con- 
struction, that it built up and increased values, and 
enlarged the utilities of the country. It proves that 
the investment was directed toward a genuine profit. 
It shows how well bestowed was all the thought of 
the financier and the builder. The purpose of that 
early work does not appear till late in the process of 
the scheme. But when it does come, it explains and 
justifies everything preliminary. 

Now, are not these cases quite analogous to the 
moral universe, or perhaps more exactly, the universe 
in its moral relations ? These, too, in any fair con- 
struction must be viewed according to their issue, 
and not according to their temporary and transitional 
aspects. We. must wait "the time." We must not 
expect the solution of these mysteries of life and 
being in this twilight season of our existence. We 
must wait " until the day break and the shadows flee 
away." The gospel names the only ground upon 
which the past and present of this weary world can be 
reconciled to our tolerance. "Judge nothing," says 



JUDGMENT OF DIVINE THINGS. 



149 



Paul, "before the time, until the Lord come." Re- 
member, he seems to say, you are beholding only a 
transitory and provisional state of things. The whole 
scheme of life centres in, and takes its meaning from, 
its high purpose. The means and the process are only 
to be read in the light of the achievement of the Cre- 
ator's aim. The whole of the long and laborious prog- 
ress, wrought out with such expenditure of thought, 
such pangs and agony, such suffering of the flesh, 
such anguish of spirit, is but the prelude to crea- 
tion's true life, the imparting of the life of God to 
his creation as fast and as far as it could receive the 
same, till it shall enjoy the fulness of a divine spirit 
in that day when the kingdoms of this world shall be 
subject to the will and spirit of love ; that wished-for 
time which men doubtfully expect in the "millen- 
nium; " that epoch which the gospel calls "the com- 
ing of the Lord." I make now no dogmatic claim. I 
do not undertake to explain the inexplicable, nor un- 
ravel the tangle, of which Ave have just said that it 
cannot be done "until the Lord come." But let me 
try, in what measure I may, to show that the gospel 
presents a reasonable and satisfactory ground for 
faith, while we await in patience the culmination of 
the divine purpose, "until the Lord come." Remem- 
ber, there is no such thing as demonstration in such 
a matter as this. We can only indicate a reason- 
able theory. For its full demonstration we must 
await the "fulness of time." 

II. "The crucial test of a thoughtful mind," says 
another, "is a sense of the mystery of life in this 



150 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



world." Nor is there any relief to that sense, espe- 
cially as it approaches the fact of evil and of sin, 
save in some such hope as the cheerful promises of 
the age encourage, that this is a growing world, 
developing toward some high end, whose attainment 
shall explain all the windings of the path by which 
it was reached. The chief mysteries of this world 
are not simply those which concern the future. The 
present and the past baffle the bravest and the bright- 
est thought. The soul itself is the seat of all mys- 
teries. 

" I am. How little more I know. 
Whence came I ? Whither do I go ? 
A centered self that feels and is ; 
A cry between the silences ; 
A shadow-birth of clouds at strife, 
With sunshine on the hills of life ; 
A shaft from nature's quiver cast, 
Into the future from the past; 
Between the cradle and the shroud, 
A meteor's flight from cloud to cloud !" 

Whittier. 

And if we turn from the soul itself, backward over 
human history, outward over the known experience 
of the creation below man, it is full of food for ques- 
tions, with very little material for enlightening an- 
swers. So that our only refuge from these manifold 
perplexities is in that pledge of our text, that the 
moral culmination of the universe, the "coming of 
the Lord," will "bring to light the hidden things 
of mystery." 

Take, for example, the long centuries of man's life 



JUDGMENT OF DIVINE THINGS. 151 



on earth. Who can read of them without weariness ? 
It is a lifelong, age-long tale of misery and strife. 
From the first it has been a struggle against the 
powers of earth, air, and water, the forces of the 
overworld and the underworld. When the Athenians 
built the Parthenon, crowned with the figure of the 
victorious Pallas Athene, they represented her stand- 
ing with her spear planted on the serpent under her 
feet, symbol of the earth and its untamed powers, in 
token of the triumph of the civilization of Greece 
over the turbulence, the savagery, the earthliness, of 
man; and surrounding the majestic temple was a 
girdle of noble sculptures, symbolizing, in the com- 
bats of heroic youth with the Centaurs and Amazons, 
the struggles of Attica against the foes of order and 
of law. Those battered relics of an elder art depict 
the whole story of humanity. Warfare, strife, rival- 
ries, collisions of interests, the strong overcoming 
the weak, selfishness robbing its neighbor, violence 
plundering and destroying, bloodshed everywhere, 
till it should seem as if the crimson stream must 

" The multitudinous seas incarnadine, 
Making the green one red." 

Take your stand at any given point in the line of 
history, — beside the primitive man who dwelt in the 
caves of the Swiss lakes ; beside the shepherd kings of 
Egypt, in the day of Xerxes, or of Julius Caesar, or 
Charlemagne, or William the Conqueror, and looking 
at that point of time, and that alone, it is doubtful 
if you would not pronounce the world under a curse. 



152 



THE LEISURE OF GOB. 



For you will find them all full of wars and rumors 
of wars, nation rising against nation, and kingdom 
against kingdom, the wretched feuds which have 
turned this fair earth into a hell, paving it with the 
bones of slaughtered men, making it echo with the 
cries of their suffering. And it seems as if, shut in 
to the actual present of any age this world ever 'saw, 
one must sigh like the poet, in the dreary words, — 

" Oh! never sin and want and woe this earth will leave, 
And the bells but mock the wailing sound, they ring so cheery. 
How long, O Lord ! before thou come again ? ' ' 

If we take the life of the world before man came 
into it, the same truth holds good. And it is little 
wonder that those who reject or have never known 
the only solution of the mystery of pain, of suffering, 
of physical evil, should be goaded to such a thought 
as broke out in the terrible sneer of Voltaire, "A 
singular notion of universal good, composed of the 
fever, the gout, of all sufferings, of all crimes, of 
death and daily damnation." Long before man ap- 
peared, the course of nature seemed to forecast his 
own destiny of struggle and of pain. For dumb 
creatures, without reason or consciences, dwelt in a 
world of strife and anguish like his own. The whole 
animate creation, till man appeared, was divided into 
the devourers and the devoured. The gnat fell a prey 
to the swallow, and the swallow to the hawk, and the 
hawk to the eagle. Great monsters grappled with 
each other in mortal struggle. The lion fleshed his 
fangs in the gentle deer, and the serpent writhed his 



JUDGMENT OF DIVINE THINGS. 



153 



venomous way to the nest of the dove. Thorns and 
thistles tore the beast's tender flesh, and flinty rocks 
cut his feet. The cyclone uprooted the forest where 
he had his lair, the flood swept him along in its ra- 
ging whirlpool, or the lightning struck him dead. 
There were pain and strife and evil in this world 
long before man added the bane of his misguided will. 

But we need not multiply these pictures of a dreary 
past. Enough for us that we see in them, once for 
all, this pregnant fact. Take any period of time, 
epoch in history, age of animal development, gen- 
eration of humanity, by itself, look at it apart from 
all relations, either as the outgrowth of a past or the 
germ of a future, the child of an elder age whose 
stern features are softened in the milder aspects of 
its offspring, or the beginning of a better day whose 
blessings shall rest on the very rigors and hardships 
which once seemed unrelieved in their severity, and 
you can make nothing cheerful out of it, nothing 
significant of beneficence and love. Treat the crea- 
tion as a closed circle, shutting out all higher ends 
than those that appear in the present, and you have 
a universe which justifies any scepticism, and gives 
the reins to despair. The only thing which permits 
you for an instant to cherish the thought of benevo- 
lence, kindness, love, in connection with this groan- 
ing creation, is the thought implanted in our minds 
by Paul's exhortation, "Judge nothing before the 
time, until the Lord come, who will bring to light 
the hidden things of darkness." 

Ah, the light, the restful suggestion, the encour- 



154 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



aging power, there is in that thought ! It is the very 
key to faith, the warrant to hope. We have no right 
to judge any point of life and experience by itself. 
It is like studying the human eye as if it were a 
separate organism. It is like trying to describe the 
Declaration of Independence without any allusion to 
the Stamp Act, the battle of Lexington, or Parliament 
and George the Third. But once admit the thought 
that all the past and all the present are looking for- 
ward, building up powers and resources for the future 
to use and draw upon ; training and disciplining intu- 
itions and aptitudes, senses, functions, volitions ; lay- 
ing deep courses of foundation-stone on which to raise 
the fair structure of a better, a holier life, and you 
have a ground on which to stand in hope. If it be 
allowed us to say and believe that the universe is not 
stationary, but growing ; its destiny one of peace and 
harmony ; its sufferings incidental to a higher enjoy- 
ment; its pangs the "growing pains" of an expand- 
ing organism — then, I say, we can afford to suspend 
our gloomy judgments, give faith her rights, and 
frankly facing every mysterious evil, from the crush- 
ing of a fly to the overwhelming of a nation, still be- 
lieve — 

" That nothing walks with aimless feet, 
That not one life shall be destroyed, 
Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
When God hath made the pile complete. 

That not a worm is cloven in vain, 

That not a moth with vain desire 

Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire, 
Or but subserves another's gain. 



JUDGMENT OF DIVINE THINGS. 155 



Behold we know not anything, 

I can but trust that good will fall, 

At last — far off — at last to all, 
And every winter change to spring." 

There is the suggestion of a special application of 
this thought to our own personal life, in the assur- 
ance of the text that in the culmination of moral 
experience the mystery of our own private struggles, 
griefs, disappointments, and failures will be inter- 
preted, and find their proper justification. When 
the heart cries out of its inward pains, " Why was I 
born to this suffering?" the spirit answers, "Wait 
and see." When the weary powers, after a lifetime 
of toil like that of Sisyphus, rolling the stone to the 
hilltop only to see it fall back to the bottom, demand 
the meaning of this seemingly fruitless task, the an- 
swer is still, " Wait and see. " When grief sits among 
the graves of its lost ones and sobs its plaint, still 
the same answer, " Trust in the Lord and wait pa- 
tiently for him." Perhaps in some blessed day of 
insight here on earth, perhaps not until the other 
side of the mysterious veil, somewhere and somehow 
the meaning will come to you and to me, when God 
shall "make manifest the counsels of the hearts," 
and "then every man shall have praise of God." 
But "until the Lord come " with revelation to your 
soul, faith may sustain the heart with the promises 
of revelation and 'the confirmation of knowledge. 
The gospel from the high peaks of inspiration points 
out the blessed Canaan of a world redeemed, of evil 
overcome, of the dark mysteries of suffering and evil 



156 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



explained in the light of their issue. What the solu- 
tion of it all may be we cannot know. That there is 
a solution, and one which glorifies God and blesses 
man, we may not doubt. Those who have spoken 
with authority and from the very counsels of God 
have seen it in store. Those who have read the past 
with the closest insight find there the prediction of 
its coming. There is light on all this world's ancient 
sorrows in the happiness of to-day. The sufferings 
of Valley Forge have borne fruit in the peace at ten 
thousand warm firesides to-day. The martyrdoms 
of the infant church are explained and glorified in 
the might and the joy of a growing Christendom. 
Even Calvary is a shade less dreadful in the light 
of the help which has issued from its cross; and it 
still looks forward to the "coming of the Lord" for 
its complete illumination. For the great Captain of 
our salvation "was made perfect through suffering," 
that all men might have praise of God. 

It would surely seem as if men ought to be as wise 
in the judgments of the world in which they live as 
they are in judging the mimic world in which they 
seek to make a picture of human life. Set a man 
down in some theatre, and let him watch the unfold- 
ing of the play. Let him follow the fortunes of the 
characters, and note the multiplying complications of 
the plot. It moves along in thickening schemes of 
evil, with increasing perplexities" and appeals to the 
sympathy. The mother hears her son is lost at sea; 
the father believes that his daughter has dishonored 
the good name of his house; the chief friends are 



JUDGMENT OF DIVINE THINGS. 157 



estranged by evil suspicions ; the hero is beset by 
plots and violence, in a net of circumstance which 
closes more and more tightly about him. And so the 
curtain falls upon the middle of the drama. Suppose 
the man has but little experience in play-going, and 
sets out now to leave the place. "This is a sad 
play," he says. "Everything here is at cross-pur- 
poses. The good people are in trouble, the bad are 
in comfort. I do not like a play so dismal." There 
is but one answer to his criticism — the play is not 
done. There is more to come. And when it comes 
it will untangle all this skein of evils. Wait till 
the curtain rises on the next act. That will repay 
you for all your waiting. You shall see the wanderer 
restored to his mother's arms. You shall see the 
stigma taken from the daughter's name, and herself 
reinstated in her father's love. You shall see the 
reconciliation of the sundered friends, the rescue of 
the hero from all his trouble, the downfall of vil- 
lany, and the establishment of the right. Then, and 
not till then, will you have the right to judge this 
drama, and call it good or bad. And in this larger 
drama of real life, where men and women are the 
actors, and all life's years of mingling experience 
the scene, how much more must we let judgment 
linger, and patience hold the mind, till we know in 
what it all culminates, and what it all has meant. 
We shall read life's meaning in life's aim and end. 
Then, when the strife of souls has eliminated all 
their evil, "all men shall have praise of God." And 
out of the hearts of the redeemed, God shall have 
praise of all men. 



158 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



SOME THINGS SETTLED. 



Heb. xii. 27. — " That those things which cannot he shaken may 
remain." 



There are two ways of viewing religious truth 
and its manifestations which are unhappily as com- 
mon as they are false. The first is the belief held by 
the conservative party in every church that all the 
truths of religion have been transmitted to the hu- 
man mind, and that the oracles of God are hereafter 
to be forever dumb. " The truth," they would say, 
u has been given once for all. Its final revelation 
has been made in Jesus Christ and his apostles. 
When their lips closed, the Holy Ghost ceased to 
speak. Since their utterances no new word has 
been uttered bearing upon the vital and necessary 
principles of the spiritual life of man. And all that 
theology has to do is to restate, and enforce with illus- 
trations and arguments which best address succes- 
sive generations, the substantial facts made known 
once for all, not to be increased and not to be di- 
minished, the unchangeable, exact, and invariable 
doctrines which the church has taught from the 
beginning." This is the belief which controls con- 



SOME THINGS SETTLED. 



159 



servative minds, and speaks in the aggressive affir- 
mations of the creeds. That was the conviction 
which wrote the triple-barred sentences of the An- 
dover Creed, and made a heretic of every bright 
mind in the Congregational Church to-day. It was 
that spirit which earlier still crystallized the dogmas 
of the Athanasian Creed, which refuse either to be 
pulverized or to fit themselves to modern thought. 
It is a misfortune to the cause of religion when this 
sentiment is in the ascendency. For it effectually 
kills all the life of religious thought, and encourages 
the false notion that the golden age of Christendom's 
religious experience is in the past. 

But quite as pernicious is that other belief, which 
holds that there is nothing final in the truths of reli- 
gion, and that even Christianity is a transitory system, 
as ephemeral as all others. " There is no final au- 
thority in religion," say these restless minds. "In 
the fields of the infinite there is nothing final. No 
man or woman has been authorized to speak the last 
word of religion. There are no settled formularies 
which may not be undone any day by some new mes- 
sage from the unseen. Religious knowledge, like 
all other knowledge, is progressive, and can never 
be more than man's imperfect attempt to state his 
theory of the life that is higher than his own. And 
so the religious life of every age differs from that 
of every other age ; so doctrines grow old and wear 
out ; so systems of belief pass into disuse. Nothing 
is fixed. No belief can be warranted to stand for any 
definite time. The faith of humanity is in a perpet- 



160 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



ual state of transfer." This is the view of religion 
maintained by that class of minds which delights to 
call itself '* advanced," and which is forever " setting 
its face to the morning light." It is the spirit which 
unsettles human faith, and welcomes the most trivial 
speculation, and is impatient of whatever savors of 
age. It is the very opposite of that other we have 
described, and in its way is equally false and dan- 
gerous. 

For neither of these attitudes toward religious 
truth is right, though each contains the semblance of 
a fact. It is not true, in the first place, that all neces- 
sary truth has been revealed to man. It is not true 
that any human statement of divine facts contains the 
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. 
Knowledge is and must ever be expansive, as long 
as God is infinite and humanity open to instruction; 
for not a month or a year passes without its revela- 
tion of fact and its advance in philosophy. The sum 
of knowledge is a growing quantity. Its accumula- 
tions are incessant and without limit. For religious 
knowledge is really our acquaintance with the Infi- 
nite God, his nature, his purposes, and his administra- 
tion. And since God is unfathomable, the knowledge 
of him must forever grow. New light is a necessity 
of the dawn and the increasing day. There is noth- 
ing in this proposition which conflicts with the teach- 
ing of our Master. Indeed, this is the teaching of 
Christ and his apostles. The Son of God came into 
the world to establish a system of truth which should 
supersede old views, and reconstruct old doctrines. 



SOME THINGS SETTLED. 



161 



His gospel supplanted the law and the prophets. His 
was the "new" covenant replacing the "old." In 
him men found a greater than Elijah, a superior to 
Moses. And he assured his friends and followers 
that they should still be taught by the Holy Spirit 
when he himself was gone from them. In the same 
way his most illustrious disciple, St. Paul, declares 
that " now we know in part," and prophesies a time 
to come when we shall "know even as also we are 
known." 

And so, too, all through the history of the church 
the same law has manifested itself, the same progress 
from truth to truth has gone on. Every century has 
yielded up some dogma it supposed to be imperish- 
able, and revised it into some new form which was as 
good as a reconstruction. The theology of to-day is 
a vastly different thing from the theology of five 
hundred years ago. Justin and Origen and Tertul- 
lian would find themselves ill at ease among the mod- 
ern sects, and so would the Archbishop of Canterbury 
in a church council of the fifth century. It is a law 
of our race that there shall be as constant an advance 
in the apprehension of religious truth as there is in 
the mastery of all other forms of knowledge and of 
faith. But does this fact carry with it the implica- 
tion that nothing is ever settled in the realm of reli- 
gious ideas? Are there no imperishable ideals? Is 
there nothing durable under these shifting aspects of 
truth? Is all the creed subject to perpetual revision? 
Are there indeed no finalities in religion ? And is it 
true that all that we hold for true we must hold as an 



162 



THE LEISURE OF GOB. 



open question, liable to refutation within any circuit 
of the sun? 

To answer these questions only requires that we 
shall remember the words of our Saviour, who, while 
he was indeed the great innovator upon the old 
faith, nevertheless said with the utmost solemnity, 
" I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil." There 
are some things in religion which we may regard 
as settled forever. Some questions are closed, and 
there is no need of reopening them. The human 
mind is forever on the march, but it does not neces- 
sarily burn its baggage and equipments every time 
it breaks camp. The aspect and the statements of 
truth may change without any change in the truth 
itself. We may remodel the house without disturb- 
ing the foundations ; we may even enlarge and 
alter the ground plan without changing the original 
lines of the dwelling. The tree may grow from 
a seed most insignificant and small. But the plan 
of the tree was all in the seed at first, and has only 
unfolded and enlarged itself from elements which 
were dormant in the germ. So the great systems 
of religious truth which have absorbed the mind 
of Christendom may be as unlike the early messages 
of inspiration whispered in the ears of Abraham 
and Moses and the prophets as the oak in full 
foliage is unlike the acorn from which it sprung. 
But the Christianity of to-day was all in the early 
utterances of revelation, — germinal, undeveloped, in 
the elemental form, but as truly outlined there as 
the matured organism is sketched in the embryo. 



SOME THINGS SETTLED. 



163 



With all the transformations which matter and mate- 
rial life undergo, there are some elements and prin- 
ciples which endure. And with all the changes in 
the aspects which religious truth assumes, it is un- 
true to assume that nothing is settled ; that there 
are no finalities ; that every article in the creed is 
liable to amendment. 

I beg you to consider, in illustration of this state- 
ment, which I hope to make seem reasonable and 
true, the analogy of scientific and religious truth. 
It is held to be one of the virtues of the # scientific 
method that it insists on holding all its systems, 
whether of fact or hypothesis, open to revision. And 
so any new discovery may upset all the old ones. 
Any new fact may render the text-book just issued 
from the press as antiquated as a last year's bird's- 
nest. And the freedom of the scientist to explore 
and speculate and theorize is held up to the devout 
as a condition most desirable among the religious. 
The Church is urged to make her creeds as supple 
as the theories of the most flexible scientific school, 
and to hold them subject to revision down to their 
last and most vital particulars. But it seems to be 
forgotten that while the facts of knowledge are sub- 
ject to every test which may be put upon them, and 
while every scientific theory is held only as a theory 
liable to change and amendment, yet that science 
itself holds a great body of truths past all controversy, 
and quite beyond the possibility of disproof. It is by 
no means the whole subject-matter of the scientist's 
faith which he holds open. He does not admit that 



164 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



his entire creed is a debatable question. There are 
many matters on which he regards the last word as 
having been spoken, and questions on which he will 
not debate at all. Who will allow for an instant that 
it is an open question whether the earth revolves 
about the sun, or the sun about the earth? What 
man of science will stop to argue with anybody who 
holds that the earth is flat? These are matters 
which science treats as settled once for all. To 
debate them further is a waste of breath ; for they 
are supported by such evidences, testimonies which 
appeal so unanswerably to the human understanding, 
that there is not the shadow of a possibility that 
they will ever be called in question. The law of 
gravitation is a settled fact of human knowledge. 
It is a matter we may properly refuse to discuss ; 
and if anybody should tell a scientist that he ought 
to hold his creed in regard to gravitation open for 
more light, he would probably answer that he would 
be glad for all the new light he could get, but that 
he was sure that all the light in the world would 
not shake the confidence with which he says to-day, 
" I believe in the law of gravitation." In the field 
of human knowledge there is an infinity of things 
to be found out. But some things we do know 
finally and once for all. It is a settled fact that 
two plus two equals four. It is fixed beyond dis- 
pute that the earth is a spheroid in shape. The 
assertion of science that the track of the storms 
which cross North America is an easterly one is 
final. No amount of free inquiry, no investigation, 



SOME THINGS SETTLED. 



165 



no light from above or beneath, will alter that 
fact ; it is a fact, a known fact, a fact which no 
circumstance can alter till the storms themselves 
begin to move by some other law. Science, indeed, 
is unsettled, does not pretend to have its returns all 
in, nor its accounts all closed ; nor does it promise 
that it ever will have its affairs brought to this con- 
dition. But with all its ardor for new truth, it pro- 
ceeds upon the assumption that there are some old 
truths which are settled forever. They lie at the 
foundation of knowledge and thought. They are 
the roots of all our wisdom. And whatever may 
be built above them, or whatever may grow out of 
them, will make no difference to their nature or 
relations to the whole body of truth. 

It is a mistake, then, to suppose that the vaunted 
fact of progress in all knowledge implies in any 
sense the upheaval of the foundations every time 
new light is thrown upon familiar things. The dis- 
covery of the daily rotation of the earth did not 
alter, what it explained, the familiar fact of sunrise 
and sunset. The discovery of the cause of the sun's 
heat would not alter the fact that that heat is the 
source of this planet's life. 

Whatever may be disclosed in chemical or physical 
science will not in the least affect the reality of the 
action of the electric fluid or of oxygen. The light- 
ning and the thunder will still go together, and oxy- 
gen will feed fire, and nitrogen retain but a slight 
affinity for other substances. Discovery cannot un- 
settle these facts, but only interpret and disclose 



166 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



their relations. In fine, whenever in the progress 
of thought a truth is ascertained, it is found out 
once for all, and future discovery will only serve to 
illustrate and classify that truth, never to unsettle it. 

If these things are true in the field of science, why 
should they not be in the field of religious thought, 
which men are trying to bring under the rules of 
scientific usage? Truth is truth, in theology as well 
as in chemistry. And so far forth as our creeds stand 
for truth, they need no revision and they will get 
none. The announcement that theology is a pro- 
gressive science does not mean that we must hold 
ourselves ready every morning to rebuild our creeds 
from the foundation. It simply means we must be 
willing to open new doors and windows, or even to 
ao^d new rooms to accommodate the new truth, sure 
to be revealed. It is not a perpetual warning to quit 
our house of faith; it is only a clause which binds 
us to keep the dwelling in repair and fit it with 
modern improvements. 

It is a matter for regret, therefore, that any mind 
should regard the common truths of religion as evan- 
escent because they assume variable shapes, or treat 
them as in a decline because they are changing. 
Nor will anything be clearer in the survey of our 
own faith than that, whatever may be destined to 
disappear, some things have come to stay. Take, for 
example, our belief in the divine existence. Is that 
one of the articles of faith which must be forever 
reckoned an open question ? Is this corner-stone of 
truth never to be cemented into its place, but always 



SOME THINGS SETTLED. 



167 



remain loose and ready for removal? There are 
those who will tell you so, who call the idea of God 
a human invention, who deny the reality behind the 
name, and who look upon the changing phases of 
belief in deity as merely the mutations of human 
opinion under the influence of growing knowledge. 
We might as well say that the shifting look of the 
world under the early twilight and the breaking day 
is a change in the human eye. The outward world 
is not a fiction. Its appearances are based upon the 
solid substance it presents. And he would be a 
shabby logician who should argue that the varying 
look of the world was evidence that there is no 
world. Just as flimsy is the doctrine which wins 
applause when the popular orators of scepticism 
utter it, that because men vary so in their conception 
of God, we are to infer that God is only a name by 
which we cover our ignorance of the unknowable. 
That men's conception of God should change as they 
see more and more of his nature and its manifesta- 
tions is not a matter for surprise. But is it not a 
singular logic which calls this expanding conception 
of God a proof that there is no God ? 

It may well be true, nay, it must be true, that 
as the mind of man grows into fuller powers new 
visions of the glory of God will present themselves, 
and things undreamed of will be added to that ideal 
of him which devout hearts have already expressed 
in their credo. But none of these will affect the 
truth about him which was unfolded from the cfer- 
minal thought in the simple faith of Abraham, to the 



168 



THE LEISURE OF GOB. 



sublime announcement of his fatherhood and his love 
made known in Jesus Christ. That fundamental of 
our faith is fixed for all time. When we say, "we 
believe in one God whose nature is love," we affirm a 
fact which time cannot shake, nor fresh light annul. 
Whatever may be revealed of the mystery of that in- 
finite personality, however high human thought may 
ascend into its sublime dignities, however profoundly 
the heart of the world may be suffered to sound in 
the depths of its love, the great fact remains fixed, 
immovable, steadfast as space, everlasting as time 
itself, the corner-stone of every creed, the flame that 
lights every torch of hope, the life of thought. 

" Thou comest not, thou goest not, 
Thou wert not, wilt not be ; 
Eternity is but a thought 
By which we think of thee. 
Thy vastness is not young or old; 
Thy life hath never grown; 
No time can measure out thy days, 
No space can make thy throne." 

So let the restless spirits who love to prophesy 
changes to come, and alarm the timid with predic- 
tions of the day when present faiths will be as far 
behind the fashion of the times as Calvin's or as 
Anselm's is to-day, let these flippant oracles spur 
us on to livelier and devouter thoughts. They can- 
not take away from us the truths we already hold. 
They may point out to us the shining peaks of truth, 
unsealed as yet by any finite foot, from whose immac- 
ulate heights the eye of the spirit will some day 



SOME THINGS SETTLED. 



169 



range into the far countries of eternity, as it now 
roves over the fields of the present. They may tell 
us that when we have reached those measureless 
heights of thought, the little spot which to-day 
seems to us so large and so important will have 
shrunk out of sight. They may tell us how changed 
the universe will look from that exalted station, and 
what a different light will be shining on the face of 
life. But there need be no fear in the heart of the 
simplest believer that that new world will be one, 
from which the ancient truths, the familiar and the 
necessary facts of being, will be missed. God will be 
there still, as he is here ; and in that day we shall re- 
member that he was here, as we shall then feel him 
there. And if in those blessed ages we care to look 
back upon these scenes, we shall see them as moun- 
taineers look down upon the valleys which they left 
all wrapped in shadows, now blazing with the light of 
the sun that has climbed the heavens all day above 
their heads. Climb on, ambitious soul! Press up 
the utmost heights of thought ! Pass the last bounds 
of knowledge ! But be sure that when thou standest 
at that dizzy altitude where thought begins to merge 
itself in simple consciousness of the infinite, even 
then thou shalt find thyself encompassed by that 
same presence and power which thou hast already 
learned to call thy Father, that One before whom 
the psalmist exclaimed in simple trust, " Surely 
goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of 
my life : and I will dwell in the house of the Lord 
forever." 



170 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



There is another article in every Christian's creed 
which affirms the spiritual supremacy of Jesus Christ, 
and many a heart that trusts in him and believes 
in his Lordship as the commissioned Saviour of men, 
is led to fear that his is after all a waning influence, 
destined to be supplanted by some new leadership, 
some better interpretation of the divine. Is that 
one of the inevitable changes of progress in theol- 
ogy, in religious knowledge? Will our advances 
.take us beyond the Christ? Will he become a 
leader of the past? And must this reverence we 
have fixed on him, and this love we have so freely 
bestowed, be transferred to some other? 

You are probably familiar with those startling 
paragraphs which appear from time to time in the 
columns of our newspapers, which purport to give 
a true account of the approaching end of this phys- 
ical world. You are told of the gradual cooling 
of the earth ; of its slow approximation to the sun ; 
of the slackening speed of that luminary ; of the 
symptoms, mathematically deduced, of the inevitable 
freezing up of this world, and then of its precipita- 
tion into the sun ; and when the mind is thoroughly 
depressed over the frigid prospect, the only relief 
you find is in the announcement that the accomplish- 
ment of this catastrophe is likely to consume so many 
billions of years that it is difficult to figure them to 
the eye. The mind ceases to take much interest in 
an affair so remote, and you go out and bask in the 
sun and plant your flowers and your corn without 
one misgiving ov^r this freezing fate in store. Be- 



SOME THINGS SETTLED. 



171 



fore that day comes you will be beyond the reach of 
its rigors. 

So it seems to me we may feel when men prophesy 
the transient character of Jesus Christ's reign over 
human souls. Our spiritual astronomy foretells a 
time when he shall no longer be the centre of our 
religious sentiments as he is to-day. Indeed, his 
chief interpreter to men, St. Paul himself, has taught 
us as much. For he tells us that when Christ shall 
have put all enemies under his feet, then shall 
he deliver up the kingdom unto God the Father, 
" that God may be all in all/' But that will be in 
the distant age when the city of our dwelling-place 
Avill have no need of the sun, 44 for the Lord God giv- 
eth them light." It will be in the age when we shall 
have no more need of creeds, or Scriptures, or guides 
at all, for every one shall know the Lord, from the 
least to the greatest. If you care to look forward to 
that day of which the Scriptures plainly teach, you 
are of course free to do so ; but it will be rather hard 
to find in it a forecast of the supersedure of our 
blessed Lord as the world's Redeemer. To him who 
sees in Jesus not merely a great teacher, not simplv a 
good man, an example and an inspiration to his fel- 
lows, but the image of the invisible God, in whom 
is revealed all that it is possible for finite minds to 
know of the Deity in their mortal estate ; to him 
this union of the divine and the human is a revelation 
which cannot be duplicated, accomplished in a nature 
which cannot and will not lose its place in the di- 
vine scheme until knowledge gives place to intuition, 



172 



THE LEI'S URE OF GOB. 



and we no longer need to read by sign and symbol, 
because we see eye to eye. 

" Forever climbs the morning star, 
Without ascent or motion ; 
Forever is its daybreak shed 

On the spirit's boundless ocean." 

You may steer by that star as long as your bark 
tosses on the troubled waters of this life. You may 
trust in the light of that daybreak until it is swal- 
lowed up in the blaze of the eternal day it heralds. 

There are other articles of the faith which, if space 
permitted, we might allege as examples of the ele- 
ments which change not, " the things which cannot 
be shaken." What conceivable discovery, what en- 
largement of knowledge, can ever change our faith 
in the connection between righteousness and blessed- 
ness ? All that the microscope and the crucible, the 
scalpel and the telescope, can bring to light ; all the 
theories which human thought can succeed in identi- 
fying with law, will not to the slightest extent affect 
the truth, as old as the nature of God himself, that 
" they that seek the Lord shall not want any good 
thing." You can pin your faith to that fact as one 
which time will only make the more impressive and 
eternity cannot reverse. As long as you and I live 
in this universe — and it will be a long day before 
we find ourselves in any other — we shall find the 
law to hold that the good man bears a blessing in his 
life, and that the bad man carries a curse. That is 
a final truth. It is as unchangeable as the being of 
God. Upon that foundation we may build the struc- 



SOME THINGS SETTLED. 



173 



tures of character, in the settled conviction that no 
vicissitude of thought can ever weaken or destroy 
them. 

Even so it is an equally durable truth that good 
is stronger than evil, and must prevail over it. That 
is a law of life which men have been slow to com- 
prehend, though it was one of the first for God to 
announce. From the day when the thought was 
flashed upon the mind of early man, " The seed of 
the woman shall bruise the serpent's head," down to 
the utterances of the gospel seer, " There shall be no 
more curse," the steadfast proclamation of the revealed 
Word has been, the evanescence of evil, the perma- 
nence of good, the weakness of the wrong, the all- 
conquering strength of the right. Human experience 
all goes to strengthen the affirmation. Every century 
makes it plainer that evil is doomed, is being crowded 
out of existence, is sure to have an end. There is no 
black and terrible surprise in store for the loving and 
trustful hearts that just begin to take firm hold upon 
this cheering fact. We are not doomed to disappoint- 
ment, and destined to awake from our dream of secu- 
rity to find that evil has an everlasting lease upon this 
universe which God can never break. The eternal 
years will only show in clearer light the perpetual 
power of truth, the vanquishing might of righteous- 
ness. Men have watched the trend of human life 
long enough to note its direction ; and the verdict of 
experience agrees with the prophecy of revelation, 
that the movement is upward and onward " through 
suffering to the stars/' 



174 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



Welcome, then, all the light and all the knowledge 
which can enlarge and purify human life, make man 
a better child of God, and a more dutiful brother. 
And if it must be that old forms of speech and old 
views of truth pass away, why let them go without 
a sigh. But remember that amid all that loss, some 
things must remain. Whatever is shaken, some truth 
abides forever. Cling to the simple faith of Christian 
hearts. Believe in God, in Christ, in the blessedness 
of doing right, in the eternal triumph of goodness. 
These tilings are settled. They are written into the 
very fibre of matter and the constitution of mind. 
No storm of discussion can sweep them away. No 
drought of spiritual death can parch their roots. No 
earthquake of doubt can unsettle their foundations. 
They are the very truth of God. And that is im- 
mutable. 



THE USE AND ABUSE OF OPTIMISM. 175 



THE USE AND ABUSE OF OPTIMISM. 



Acts xxvii. 22-26. — "And now I exhort you to be of good cheer: 
for there shall be no loss of life among you, but only of the ship. For 
there stood by me this night an angel of the God whose I am, whom 
also I serve, saying, ' Fear not, Paul ; thou must stand before Caesar ! 
and lo, God hath granted thee all them that sail with thee.' Where- 
fore, sirs, be of good cheer : for I believe God, that it shall be even 
so, as it hath been spoken unto me. Howbeit we must be cast upon 
a certain island." (R, V.) 



After such words as those, spoken to men who 
were driving before a Mediterranean gale, hungry, 
worn, and distressed, I suppose Paul may be safely 
pronounced an optimist. That was an instance of 
persistent looking on the bright side. There was 
nothing in his surroundings to give him or his com^ 
panions any heart whatever. Their ship had been 
seriously used by the storm. Part of her cargo and 
tackle had been thrown overboard. Her company 
had been long without food. The storm seemed un- 
abated, and their reckoning was lost. In this plight 
the confidence of Paul, and his obstinate refusal to 
be daunted, are evidences of a marvellously hopeful 
mind. Even a vision of angels, such as reassured 
him, would hardly have been enough, under the cir- 



176 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



cumstances, to allay the fears and doubts of some 
men. But Paul's faith was the basis of his hope. 
He was cheerful because he had implicit trust in his 
God. His optimism was of that deep and worthy 
sort which rests, not on a sanguine temperament, nor 
prosperous surroundings, but on the certainty and 
goodness of that divine purpose which runs through 
all the creation. 

You will notice, too, that it was an open-eyed 
optimism, not resting on ignorance, or short-sight- 
edness, or stupidity. Paul looked on the bright side 
in spite of the dangers around and ahead. " Where- 
fore, sirs," he says, "be of good cheer;" yet in the 
very next breath adds this discomfiting prediction, 
"Howbeitwe must be cast upon a certain island." 
That was a most matter-of-fact cheerfulness. It was 
not blind to present difficulties, hardships, or disas- 
ter. It simply rose above them all in the strength 
of a faith superior to their depressions and discour- 
agements. Paul foresaw the trials in store for this 
storm-beaten party. He realized their dangers. He 
fully measured their difficulties. Nevertheless, he 
could say, "Be of good cheer." At a very dangerous 
moment, and with clear prescience of more serious 
trials still to come, Paul's word was one of trust. 
He looked on the bright side. 

We may safely take his optimism as a pattern for 
our own. It was exemplary. It was rightly rooted 
and rightly qualified. And it suggests to us the 
right and the wrong kind of optimism, its use and 
its abuse. For I hold that every Christian is in 



THE USE AND ABUSE OF OPTIMISM. 177 



duty bound to be an optimist; to look on the bright 
side, to believe in the triumph of the best, to be of 
good cheer. That is the essence of our religion. 
Christianity has been from the very beginning the 
religion of cheerfulness. It was announced as the 
message of glad tidings. It was preached as good 
news. It teaches, above all things, the right and 
the duty to be joyful. And I do not see how any 
man can be a true Christian and look on the dark 
side ; be full of glooms and fears and terrors ; live in 
apprehension, and die in alarm. If God rules, and 
if God is love, there is no danger that the universe 
will get off the track, or any soul in it miss its true 
destiny. Neither can any of life's disasters fatally 
hurt us. You may get a warrant for your fears and 
for your timidities elsewhere, but you will never get 
it in your Christianity. For that everywhere bids 
men be of good cheer; rejoice evermore; be glad in 
the Lord; be not afraid. And our despondencies 
are ill-assorted with the cheering progress of the race. 
Our timidity does not agree with the character we 
assign to the Lord. Our dull complaints ignore the 
goodness which we believe God manifests to us and 
to all his children. One of two things every consist- 
ent man must do. He must renounce either his 
Christianity or his despondency. He cannot look 
on the dark side and on the Christian side at the 
same time. If he yields himself to his unhappy tem- 
pers, his moody glooms, he does so against the protest 
of all his Christian faith. You can find no warrant 
for pessimism between the lids of the New Testament. 



178 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



The Christian view of life, therefore, enjoins upon 
us the duty of hopefulness, cheerfulness, the antici- 
pation of good. In our personal lives, in our expec- 
tation of the world's future, we are committed, as 
Christians, to believe in the best and brightest, to 
cultivate a steadfast cheerfulness, to cherish an unal- 
terable courage. We find the pattern of our disposi- 
tion in the words of Paul, " Now I exhort you to be 
of good cheer." 

But while we should cultivate an optimism of this 
sort as the very substance of our religion, we ought 
to take good care that it is seasoned with common- 
sense. There is very little good in a cheerfulness 
which is blind to danger, insensible to difficulties, 
and ignorant of the obstacles and delays to success. 
One easily gets out of patience with that bland and 
obtuse hopefulness which smiles in the face of danger, 
and makes no effort against the peril it does not real- 
ize. There are people who will face the most tre- 
mendous crises, and go out to meet the most serious 
difficulties, with perfect serenity, because they do not 
realize what is threatening. I used to have a neigh- 
bor who would come out of his house in the morning 
when the wind was drawing in from the east, and the 
rainy clouds were all over the sky, and smilingly pre- 
dict a pleasant day perhaps five minutes before the 
storm would break. He was an optimist, but a very 
foolish one, because his amiable desire to look on the 
bright side led him to shut his eyes to facts which 
were staring him in the face. And so I would urge 
that while it is a Christian virtue to look on the 



THE USE AND ABUSE OF OPTIMISM. 179 



bright side, we are never justified in letting this dis- 
position or principle lead us to underrate real difficul- 
ties or dangers. We must remember that while the 
results of God's providential purpose in this world 
are not doubtful, but certain to be for the best, the 
process of teaching those results depends upon human 
wisdom, human courage, and human faithfulness. 
And no amount of hopefulness as to the results 
should cause us to lose sight of the means of attain- 
ing them, the toil, the care, the patience, the wisdom, 
needful to circumvent difficulty and avert peril. 

Yesterday there sailed from yonder port a stanch, 
well-appointed steamship, bound for England. She 
is well-built, well-officered, well-manned. Her com- 
mander is a thorough seaman, and knows the ability 
of his ship. He has every reason to expect a safe 
and prosperous voyage. But it never will do for 
him to forget that the ability of his vessel and his 
crew to cope with all the perils to navigation does 
not lessen the reality of those perils by so much as 
a hair. They are real, imminent, continuous. The 
price of safety on the high seas is constant vigilance. 
It would be folly for the commander, because he 
knows his ship is stanch, to throw off all respon- 
sibility, laugh and joke with the passengers, leave 
the vessel to sail herself, and trust to luck for a safe 
run to Queenstown. Every moment of the time that 
ship is watched as carefully as if every moment were 
critical with her. From stem to stern, and from 
bridge to stoke-hole, she is under incessant surveil- 
lance. Her commander knows he has a stout ship, 



180 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



and so he has no fears. But he knows that a 
stout ship carelessly handled will be no better than 
a weak one. And he will not allow his confidence 
in his vessel to abate one jot from his vigilance and 
care. He will still maintain all his respect for 
North Atlantic fogs, and will be just as much on his 
guard against vagrant icebergs. 

Now, there is a lesson here for us all who are proud 
of our optimism, and who love to see the world all 
sunshine and smiles. The fact that creation is sure 
to be a success, and society regenerated at last, does 
not in the least abate the dangers which threaten, 
through which, and by overcoming which, we are to 
be saved. They are none the less real because they 
are temporary. The conflict they will involve is 
none the less bitter because it will give victory to 
the right. The perils, for instance, which gather 
around the immediate future of our own nation lose 
none of their seriousness because we so confidently 
believe in the ability of the times to cope with them. 
We are doubtless as well able to take care of the 
problems laid upon our minds and hearts as our 
forefathers were to decide the question of national 
liberty, or our brothers the problem of negro slavery. 
But remember, after all, we shall have to take care 
of our problems in the same way, with toil and 
thought, with anxious vigilance and patient plan- 
ning. And let us not underrate their serious mean- 
ing to us and our age, because of our sanguine faith 
that they will be satisfactorily solved and cast out 
of our way at last. Remember that Paul, though he 



THE USE AND ABUSE OF OPTIMISM. 181 



foresaw the happy issue of his perilous Mediterranean 
voyage, confessed to his fellow- voyagers that they 
must first pass through the sufferings of shipwreck. 
"Howbeit we must be cast upon a certain island." 

It is sometimes laid to the charge of those of us 
who believe in the final overthrow of evil, that we 
are so easily confident of this divine consummation 
that we overlook the seriousness of the conflict which 
is waging with it, and come to think lightly of the 
nature of sin. It is true that some teachers of the 
liberal faith have done this. They have glozed 
the enormity of sin, and treated moral transgression 
as a venial affair. They have argued, with a shallow 
optimism, that things are not so very bad as they 
seem, that they are constantly improving, that by 
and by they will all be right, and so have taught 
men to think and speak slightingly of sin, as if it 
were a mere incident in life, and not a very serious 
one at that. But this is not a wise optimism. For 
no future hope for man, no prospect of the final 
overthrow of evil, can ever make sin one whit less 
vile, or its consequences less serious and blighting 
to human souls. No man makes light of a fever, or 
of the rheumatism, or of the small-pox, because they 
are curable diseases. And why should men "make 
a mock at sin " when they have come to believe in 
the salvability of the whole human race? The joy 
of that sinless future does not lessen the woes of this 
sin-laden present. The distant morning of salvation 
is fair in its first faint appearings. But the dreaiy 
darkness of human sinfulness still gathers heavily 



182 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



around men's souls. And before we can catch those 
triumphant strains which shall signalize the victory 
of the Son of God, we are destined to hear the war- 
cry on many a fierce field where evil men oppose 
the good, and righteousness contends inch by inch 
for the mastery of the earth. It is poor military 
judgment to underrate the strength of your foe. It 
is bad navigation to misjudge the nature of your 
soundings, or the violence of the squall. It is a poor 
kind of optimism which surveys the battle-field of 
the moral forces of the age, where mighty legions are 
marshalling for colossal conflicts, and prophesies that 
there is not going to be much of a fight after all. I 
thank God every day of my life that from my child- 
hood I have been taught to look on the bright side, 
and believe in the final victory of all that is best and 
purest and holiest. But I have equal reason for 
gratitude that I never learned that it was an essen- 
tial element of this cheerful faith to underrate the 
seriousness of the evils whose overthrow must pre- 
cede that glorious victory. It makes a man a better 
soldier in the army of the Lord to feel an unbounded 
assurance that he is on the side which is destined to 
win an unqualified victory. Bat he is a wiser and 
more useful fighter if he realizes the character and 
the resources of the enemy. 

But there is another caution which the man or 
woman of cheerful and easy-going nature must ob- 
serve as a check upon the over-sanguine hopes which 
temperament begets. It is very easy to expect too 
much from special forms of attack upon social evils. 



THE USE AND ABUSE OF OPTIMISM. 183 

It is easy to underestimate the vast obtuseness, or 
inertness, or depravity of men. It is very common 
in young people, full of the fresh and honest moral 
enthusiasms of youthful life, and brimming with 
courage, to engage in the crusade against the shams 
and the evils of society, to start in their schemes 
of ameliorating' the condition of the burdened and 
groaning creation, in the hope of accomplishing their 
aim in short order. You meet the young preacher 
to-day, and he is full of special and patent methods 
for reaching the deadly sins of life, and of converting 
the deadly sinners. He knows his own earnestness, 
he believes in the strength of a good cause, he trusts in 
the power of Heaven to help him, and he thinks the 
victory will be speedy and grand. You meet him ten 
years later, and you find him a different man. He is 
more modest in his expectations. He has learned 
what a slow-going world this is. He has discovered 
the power of old habits, of deep-seated prejudices, of 
hereditary appetites, and morbid passions. His hopes 
are disappointed; possibly he himself is saddened. 
He has measured his strength against that of the 
world, and has found that regeneration is not wrought 
by any patent process, nor in fits of zeal, nor in flank- 
movements on the enemy's lines. It comes of hard, 
patient toil, the added efforts of thousands and mil- 
lions of hearts, the fragrant sacrifices of whole gener- 
ations. 

You will sometimes hear nervous and active men 
and women commenting on the deliberate and slug- 
gish way in which the day laborer digs with pick and 



184 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



shovel in the trenches along the street. They criti- 
cise the lazy style of his work, and would like to 
spur him up and make him hurry. But the man 
with the shovel is not so lazy after all. He has 
simply begun work at a pace which he can keep up 
all the day long. Just let his dapper critics take 
the tools, and begin at the lively rate they would 
like to see him taking, and long before the sun is 
at the zenith, they will be wilted in their half-dug 
trenches. The fact is, the laborer has measured the 
resistance of the solid earth to his most vigorous 
efforts. He knows how stubborn it is. And he 
gauges his working-pace to the resistance he meets, 
and learns not to expect too much. 

It would be well if some of our ardent reformers, 
some devoted Christians even, would take this lesson 
to heart. There is no use in beginning a religious 
or a reform movement at a pace that must be slack- 
ened in a month. And it is neither wholesome nor 
wise to raise the hopes of the sanguine to the pitch 
of expecting immediate and decisive results in mat- 
ters which cannot yield them except to long continued 
toil. We may recall the earnestness and power which 
were put into the reform-club movement when those 
organizations were first formed to reclaim the intem- 
perate and war upon the rumseller. Doubtless they 
were of great service, and helped the good cause 
along. But they never began to do all that was 
expected of them by the sanguine hearts who first 
fell into line to found them. I well remember the 
stir that was made by a reform club in my own 



THE USE AND ABUSE OF OPTIMISM. 185 



neighborhood. It was a phenomenon. We brought 
together a score of old drinkers, and got their sig- 
natures, and started them in the new way. And 
hopeful people were all ablaze with enthusiasm, and 
prophesied great results, and felt that the secret of 
true and permanent temperance reform had been dis- 
covered. But they were disappointed. The advan- 
tage gained was not nearly what was expected. The 
truth was, the real strength of the ancient evil had 
not been half appreciated, nor its power of resistance 
well calculated. And this enthusiasm was, after all, 
only a single wave in the slowly rising tide of reform, 
and could not of itself float inebriates into a tem- 
perate life, any more than one breaker can lift a 
stranded vessel from a sand-bar. 

Now that I am urging the moderation of hu- 
man hopes by reason and good sense, let me refer to 
a third way in which the sanguine are often disap- 
pointed, and find their optimism brought to grief. 
It is in confusing present results with God's final 
purposes. There is a sort of short-range faith, com- 
mon among religious people, which prays at night, 
and then judges God according to the answer which 
comes before breakfast. Men confound the slowly 
maturing purposes of God with the incidents of this 
day or this week. And many a scoff is levelled at 
the optimist, and taken to heart by him, because it 
is not remembered that while God moves surely he 
moves slowly in his works. Looking on the bright 
side does not of necessity mean expecting uniform 
prosperity or success. Paul was of good cheer when 



186 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



he thought of the final issue of that tempestuous 
voyage. But his immediate expectation was of ship- 
wreck. If his had been a weak and shallow optimism, 
it might have been disconcerted by that impending 
trial ; for there are many minds that can see no justifi- 
cation for optimism, in the face of any evil whatso- 
ever. The slightest dash of trouble upsets their faith 
in the divine goodness; nor can they discern "the 
soul of goodness in things evil," even when they are 
assured that the evil is but temporary. But any man 
who is determined by his convictions to look on the 
bright side must be prepared to do it in spite of 
present ills and transient trials. It is God's good 
purpose to make us perfect through suffering. And 
we must accept the present evils, so as not to make 
them a bar to our good cheer. For we cannot meas- 
ure God's intent by the present, the immediate issue 
of our labors. Our God is leisurely in his methods, 
and toils with the certainty and with the deliberation 
of one who knows his omnipotence. There is a tire- 
less constancy in his work which shames our spas- 
modic heats. We lie down at night and think the 
Lord has forgotten his creation. But even as we 
sleep he is pressing it forward. We wake with the 
day, and in the clash of worldly noise we lose the 
sound of his engines. But still they whirl and grind 
and labor. Year after year we may scan the fields 
of life, always to find the movements going on which 
show that God is working. If our knowledge could 
cover a century we should find the agents of God, 
never stopping for breath, restless, sleepless, tireless, 



THE USE AND ABUSE OF OPTIMISM. 187 



strong, indefatigable, as fresh as they were when the 
morning of the creation dawned. Out of such delib- 
erate toil results come slowly, and that is a poor sort 
of Christianity which gets discouraged because the 
harvests of heaven are so slow in ripening. 

Let the man who is looking for the bright side of 
things remember that he must lift his eyes beyond 
the horizon of this present, beyond the immediate 
outcome of earthly labor, if he would justify his 
optimism. We must not judge God upon too nar- 
row evidence, but bear in mind that he who has all 
eternity in which to perfect his wise designs, can 
afford not to hurry. 

It would be a sad perversion of the truth, if, with 
the growth of the spirit of hope and good cheer which 
properly and naturally flows from Christianity, we 
were to grow indolent too, and careless and inert in 
the face of the real difficulties and trials of life. For 
the logical basis of our trust is that the love of God, 
working in the hearts of men, will stir them to more 
and more activity. So we have no right to expect 
good to come except through toil, trials, and denials. 
I cannot see where the doctrines of the Liberal wing 
of Christendom have ever abated a jot or a tittle of 
the enthusiasm of men and. women for Christian work. 
A noted Orthodox divine, thinking to alarm his fel- 
low Christians over the spread of heresy at Andover, 
once asked with a sneer, " Where are the Universal ist 
missions?" and seemed to think the case made out 
against the church that bears the tidings of genuine 
good cheer to men. It was a shallow fling. I know 



188 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



no body of men and women more willing and eager 
to work for their fellow-men than these same believers 
in the final victory of good over evil. The missions 
of the Universalist Church are just where the missions 
of the Congregational Church were seventy-five years 
ago. Nay, let me say, every Universalist church is 
itself the outgrowth of the missionary spirit which 
made men willing to sacrifice grandly for the sake of 
carrying a blessed light to them that sit in darkness. 
Still more than that, if any one seeks evidences of 
the missionary work of Universalism, let him look 
over the history of the first three centuries of the 
Christian Church, and there, where the spirit of 
Universalism was most prevalent, where it was the 
prevailing faith, witness the growth and effectual 
labors of the church, put forth and finding fruition 
in the conversion of the Roman Empire from pagan- 
ism to Christianity. That is the true effect of this 
cheerful optimism which Christianity fosters when it 
is rightly qualified and balanced. It does not lull 
into indolence, but stimulates to activity. It does 
not "cut the cord of missionary effort," but thrills 
it with a new strength. It does not minimize the 
evils which man has to overcome, but only rates them 
at their true value. It calls men to be of good cheer, 
but it also bids them to be ready to " toil terribly." 



THE CUBIST IN THE CBEATION. 189 



THE CHRIST IN THE CREATION. 



1 Pet. i. 20. — " Who was foreknown indeed before the foundation 
of the world, hut was manifested at the end of the times for jour 
sake." (R. V.) 



The creation of the world, as modern thought 
conceives it, is a process, not an act. It is a process 
still present and in progress, not an act in the past 
tense. It is a process which has kept and still keeps 
the Divine Power in perpetual exercise. We have 
only to go to the seashore to see the same works in 
progress as made the old red sandstone. A thou- 
sand rivers still cut their way through bluffs and 
over lowlands, and great glaciers here and there 
grind down the surface of vast territories. The 
agencies of climate, tides, volcanoes, earthquakes, 
ice, and the terrestrial motions, are still working mu- 
tations of the same sort as we see recorded in the 
long cycles of geologic history. Nothing is at rest 
in the creation. God is as busy to-day as he ever 
has been ; his hand is as close to his creation ; his 
power is in as active exercise. In the shaping of 
the earth, not less than in the march of races, the 



190 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



Creator is still and forever present, active, manifest- 
ing new phases of his power and of his purpose. 

In this ceaseless toil of the Creator, and in the 
interminable changes of his creation, it is the privi- 
lege of our day to see the unmistakable signs of prog- 
ress. Judged by the highest standards of our human 
intelligence, these changes in the creation are seen to 
have definite direction. There is more than motion ; 
there is motion toward an end, and that end the 
increasing reign of good, the prevalence of higher 
over lower, of better over worse, of the enduring 
over the transient. There is the development of a 
systematic order, the gradual ascent of life. We 
may trace the fact, however we may find ourselves at 
fault about the process. Each age surpasses its pred- 
ecessor. Each new form of life improves upon the 
old. And last of all, in the process of time, comes 
man, the culminating type of the physical creation, 
in whom, indeed, the physical passes over into the 
spiritual. 

There is no need to rehearse this familiar scheme, 
the commonplace of our thought, and the foundation 
of all our theories of life. I simply state its well- 
known postulates, that I may remind you of one or 
two important inferences which must be made from 
these truths. 

1. If we believe in the development of the crea- 
tion, we must, of course, believe in its continuity. 
If it is a slowly unfolding system, then its parts must 
be related. There must be a continuous line of con- 
nection running through them, from the lowest up to 



THE CHRIST IN THE CREATION. 191 



the highest. If the highest and the latest run back- 
ward to find their origin, then in the lowest and the 
lowliest we shall find some prophecy, some fore- 
thought, some adaptation, looking toward that which 
is yet to come. That is to say, we find in the creation 
a continuity which indicates nothing short of purpose. 
And as we study its earlier features, we must not 
be surprised if we find in their incompleteness some 
forecast of what is to come and fulfil their lack. 
The root foretells the leaf and the branch. The 
foundations point upward to the capstone. And so, 
too, the lower types of life all tend toward a culmi- 
nation in humanity. As a distinguished scientific 
writer has phrased it : " The creation of man is still 
the goal toward which nature tended from the begin- 
ning." " The whole creation has been groaning and 
travailing together in order to bring forth that last 
specimen of God's handiwork, — the Human Soul." 
Is there nothing in that thought which throws a new 
meaning into the first words of our text, and con- 
nects the advent of the spiritual man, in the person 
of Jesus Christ, with all the earlier and preliminary 
stages of creation ? — 4 * Who was foreknown indeed 
before the foundation of the world." If the appear- 
ance of the Christ be part of God's great plan, then it 
follows by the law of continuity that every step and 
phase of creation's development had him full in view, 
from the very earliest, yea, " from the foundation of 
the world ! " 

2. Another corollary to this law of development 
is the almost equally striking law of reserve. The 



192 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



highest things in creation are held in store. They 
are not lavished in haste. They who would see them 
must abide the fulness of time. Something is ever 
withheld from the earlier day that will be revealed 
and conferred in the later. Not because God favors 
one generation more than another, but because the 
law of progressive development imposes this neces- 
sity. All things cannot be given at once. Some 
things must wait. This later earth, in all its fer- 
tility, was not given to the primitive man. Because 
there must be some to lay the deeper courses of 
human life, down in the dim ages of earth's morning 
twilight. The full truth about God was not given 
to humanity in its youth; and Christ was only mani 
fested, as the text says, " at the end of the times." 

This truth, this universal law of mental and of 
spiritual life, ought to be a sufficient answer to those 
who cannot reconcile the thought of God's universal 
goodness, with the fact that he manifests that good- 
ness in developing gradations through special souls 
and particular races, withholding from some what he 
confers upon others, delaying the benefits for which 
the early generations long and wait, till some later day. 
This is the law which is especially manifest in reve- 
lation ; where, indeed, it is asserted and reasserted 
with peculiar care. But it is no truer there than it 
is in every department of man's varied life. All his 
thought, and all his unfolding relations to the world 
he possesses, show this invariable principle. The early 
Greek does not have the sense of beauty which makes 
his descendants the artists of the world. The man of 



THE CHRIST IN THE CREATION. 



193 



the seventh century knows nothing of that freedom 
and security under law which are reserved for his 
posterity in the nineteenth. Abraham sees less than 
Paul. Scythia does not share the privilege of Eng- 
land. Africa is placed in the very rear of the 
marching nations. Nor could any other principle 
be expected in a world where the law of progress 
and development obtained. The law is beautifully 
and accurately stated in the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
where the writer says : " All these, having obtained a 
good report through faith, received not the promises, 
God having provided some better thing for us, that 
they without us might not be made perfect." The 
glories of the noon cannot come in the morning twi- 
light. The strength of manhood cannot rest on the 
shoulders of the child. Every life must move slowly 
to its own maturity and culmination. And when 
that climax comes, and the highest life is revealed, 
all earlier, lesser, imperfect life becomes full of a 
radiant meaning, revealed now in the light of the 
perfected purpose it served. 

And so humanity finds its culmination in Jesus 
Christ. And it finds this culmination not in any 
merely nominal and accidental fashion. We are not 
to consider him as a being who has won, by a chance 
use of circumstances, a fortuitous prominence among 
men. He is the head of the human race not by 
virtue of meritorious conduct, as if lie had been 
promoted in return for good behavior. We look 
on him as the head of our race, by virtue of that 
divine plan which the apostle declared has been 



194 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



pursued from the beginning, in whose continuity 
there has been no break, whose progress lias had 
one constant direction, and that an upward and 
aspiring movement. He is not the model, by vir- 
tue of good conduct ; he is the type, by virtue of 
inborn nature. He comes to humanity as the first- 
born of its new men, its spiritual men. He is the 
new Adam in the same sense that the first man 
who ever bore these familiar features, and mani- 
fested the will, the consciousness, and the facul- 
ties which have ever since distinguished the human 
family from every other, was the first Adam. 

For, according to any theory of the creation, 
whether it be that of the latest science or of the old- 
est theology, somewhere along the line of life man 
began to be. There was a time when no such being 
as man existed. The earth knew not his like. He 
was not, and he came to be. And whoever the first 
being was in whom the traits of our humanity ap- 
peared, he was the type, as he was the physical an- 
cestor, of all the rest. This first man, this Adam, 
embodied and begot our human nature. In him it 
first appeared; through him it was transmitted to 
posterity. No matter how the dispute shall be set- 
tled between the warring theories as to man's first 
parent in the flesh, one thing is certain : he had such 
a progenitor, through whom he has received the char- 
acteristics of his humanity. 

Now, we do not say of the first man that he is the 
" model man " in physical and mental life. We do 
not lay much stress on the fact that we are to eat as 



THE CHRIST IN THE CREATION. 195 



he ate, sleep as he slept, articulate, walk, see, or hear 
as he did. For in these matters, back of all conscious 
and voluntary action, lies the nature which the Crea- 
tor gave to him, which we inherit through him. And 
so we call him rather the "type," the original from 
whom our physical life is derived. And though each 
one of us in one sense receives his physical life fresh 
from the hands of God, in another and perfectly le- 
gitimate way we may speak of our life as conformed 
to the physical natures we received through our first 
parent. We are made in his image physically. He is 
the first-born of every creature, according to the flesh. 
And as we stand at this late point in the creation, 
and the long procession of life unfolds itself before 
our eyes, we can see, without any undue strain upon 
our thought, a high and mysterious power, in whose 
presence we must stand with hearts abashed and 
awestruck, moulding the successive forms of life 
into higher and nobler types, in whose succession, 
and by whose slow gradations, we can discern the 
way steadily opening for the advent of humanity. 
Nor is it too much to say, when the first human 
being steps upon the stage of life, that all the lines 
of this great drama have been written with him in 
view ; all its scenery arranged to culminate in his 
appearance. It is scarcely an excessive paraphrase 
of the text to say that man himself " was foreknown 
indeed from the foundation of the world, but was 
manifested at the end of the times." 

But the creation does not end in or with the evolu- 
tion of the physical man, or with man as he lives the 



196 THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



life of the senses and the lower passions. It is des- 
tined to touch a higher mark, even on this earth. 
There is in the progress we mark by our studies in 
history and anthropology, an evident gain in moral 
life. Man tends constantly to a life of spirituality. 
His senses lose their absolute sway. His lower af- 
fections weaken. His reason, his conscience, his un- 
selfish sentiments, acquire larger control over him. 
Everything in his past points to a time when he will 
be a nobler, a more unselfish, more spiritually minded 
creature; just as the steady rise in the quality of 
animal life in the lower orders may be read as a pre- 
diction of the coming- time when animal life shall 
have a worthier representative than the tiger or the 
ape. But still, as we scan the horizons of the elder 
world we find no sign of any soul who might be 
justly called the type of this new life. Humanity 
cries out for such an one. The elements of a new 
life seem organizing. The years grow more and 
more pregnant with the signs that a higher life is 
approaching humanity. And at last the marvellous 
day arrives. A man is born into human life unlike 
any of his predecessors. He is as much an anomaly 
as the man Adam among the dumb creatures which 
till his time had tenanted the earth. He is as much 
of a surprise in history as the first individual in the 
class of primates, in whom thought and consciousness 
and conscience had their birth. The birth of Jesus 
of Nazareth is as marked an event in the course of 
history as the creation of man. For in him man 
is re-created. He is the first of the new men, the 



THE CHRIST IN THE CREATION. 197 



men of the spirit, the race which is to carry on the 
line of evolution and of progress. In him we see 
a new influx of divine creative power, as real and as 
marked as that which occurred when this earth was 
flung off from the cooling nebula, or when Adam was 
created the first of the human race. Through him the 
divine life of God came to our race, just as conscience 
and consciousness came to us by and through the first 
man, Adam. I just as truly believe in Jesus Christ as 
our progenitor in the higher life of the spirit, as I be- 
lieve in the first creative man as my ancestor in the 
body. Through the one I am what I am physically. 
Through the other I am what I am spiritually. True, 
my spiritual life is of God. It is the constant indwell- 
ing of the divine nature and love in my heart. Cut 
off from God it could not endure for an instant. But 
so is my physical life the constant gift of the Creator 
and Preserver of being. Were not my body sus- 
tained by that vital energy whose mysterious sources 
lie high up among the hills of the everlasting life, 
it must vanish in a moment. But the character- 
istics of that body come to me by inheritance from 
the first Adam. There is a historic connection be- 
tween my bodily life and his ; and all these members 
are living witnesses of one who lived in a like body, 
far back in the dim twilight at the dawn of history. 

Even so are my spiritual life, and yours, and hu- 
manity's, derived from the life of that Divine Soul 
who is " the first-born of every creature." It pleased 
God to send us spiritual life in its divinest form, just 
as he sent us physical life in its human shape by the 



198 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



person of a man. That man was Jesus, called the 
Christ. We are what we are because he was what 
he was, and what God created him to be, as Paul 
says, " the first-born among many brethren." A new 
type of life was begun with his advent, a life as dif- 
ferent from the elder forms of human existence and 
activity as man's life was better than that of the 
beasts of the field. It is a life which unfolds as 
slowly as man's physical life has grown. And it is a 
life whose energies can be traced as truly to the life 
of Jesus as your pedigree and mine can be run back 
to Adam. For as new centuries roll past, and this 
soul-life of the human race unfolds with the lapse of 
time, the men of the future will see more and more 
valid reasons for this reference of the better life in 
human hearts to Jesus Christ. It was not without 
reason that men began a new era in time with the 
birth of our Lord. For with him begins a new epoch 
in the evolution of life. 

What else than this is the teaching of Paul in the 
lucid statement he makes in his letter to Corinth, a 
statement which anticipates Darwin and Spencer by 
1800 years? " The first man Adam," he declares, 
" became a living soul. The last Adam became a 
life-giving spirit." Is not that the very germ of our 
doctrine of the relation of Jesus to the living crea- 
tion ? "Howbeit," — and mark how easily these 
sentences fit into any large and profound scheme 
of evolution, — " Howbeit, that is not first which is 
spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterward 
that which is spiritual. The first man is of the 



THE CHRIST IN THE CREATION, 



199 



earth, earthy ; " the second man is of heaven. These 
are not sentences of contrast so much as they are 
sentences of continuity. They trace the lineal con- 
nection, the progressive relation of body and soul, 
the man after the flesh, and the man after the spirit. 
They are the key to all that higher progress which 
has led man up from lower life and lower aims to a 
condition in which the soul begins to rule the body ; 
a progress which shall not cease until man ends 
where Jesus Christ began, in a disposition of perfect 
obedience and love toward God. Truly this is a 
thought which sheds a new glory upon the page of 
life, and helps us read many a hard passage in the 
word of God. It is the prophecy of the reconcilia- 
tion which men are always hoping for, and which by 
and by will come, between religion and science, when 
we shall see the fine and far-reaching truth in Ten- 
nyson's lines : — 

" Our little systems have their day, 

They have their day and cease to be ; 
They are but broken lights of Thee, 
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they." 

If, now, this be the true meaning of our text, and 
if Jesus Christ does indeed stand in this relation to 
human life and human history, mark what a help we 
have out of many of the most perplexing features of 
theology and of spiritual truth. 

I. See how natural becomes the whole process of 
salvation, and of the incarnation of the Son of God. 
If it be true that Jesus " was indeed foreknown be- 



200 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



fore the foundation of the world," and is " the first- 
born of every creature," the type and beginning of 
the new manhood, then he enters into the course 
of nature, not as an intruder, unrelated to the sys- 
tem of nature and of human life, thrown as it were 
into an unexpected breach in the divine plan, but as 
a necessary and natural figure in the unfolding course 
of the divine plan. He takes his place as the first 
in that new line of evolution which starts at the 
point where the soul begins its superselfish exist- 
ence, its life of free obedience to divine law. The 
nature of the Christ gains immeasurably when we 
place him where he should stand, not apart from all 
this scheme of things in which humanity is working 
out its salvation and its glory. Accept the ordinary 
teachings of theology, and Jesus is only the after- 
thought of God, a nature created to remedy the rav_ 
ages of sin. He has no organic relation to our race 
nor to its normal life. He is only a reserve force 
of the Almighty, summoned to bridge over an emer- 
gency. Adopt the thought of St. Paul, and you 
see in him an element in creation as natural as the 
sun, the air, as man himself. There is no wrench, 
no sudden swerving- from the direct line of creation's 
slow development, when we come to Christ. Nay, 
but on his heart life is carried on and up, and is 
borne into that realm in which dwell the purely 
spiritual forces of the Creator, working not for time, 
but for eternity. 

II. Still further, this view of our Lord's place in 
the creation makes his office a higher one than that 



THE CTI1U ST IN THE CREATION. 201 

of an Exemplar. He who sees in the Christ only a 
model set for our imitation loses all appreciation of 
his most vital relation to our souls. He serves us 
most, not by the example he sets us, but by the life 
with which he quickens us, a life which we receive 
by the Spirit he has introduced into this world, for 
which we are as truly indebted to him as we are to the 
man who first gave our race the mighty boon of fire. 
He blesses humanity most, not in his likeness to it, 
but in his unlike n ess, his measureless supremacy. 
For out of his higher life we derive life. In him, 
and through him, we live anew. But without him 
we can do nothing. Not as imitators of his deeds, 
but as the children of his Spirit, do we receive the full 
powers of his blessed life. And never till this world 
is thus touched and awakened to the higher spirit of 
life can we hope for that millennial reign promised 
of old and prayed for all through the ages. When 
the brightness of that morning' shall have dawned 
upon us, we shall know, as we cannot now, how truly 
it came to us through the living Spirit of Jesus the 
Christ. 



202 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



THE CITY THAT IS TO COME. 



Heb. xiii. 14. — " For here we have no continuing city, but we seek 
one to come." 



It is possible for us to conceive of the life that 
is to come only in symbols furnished out of the life 
that now is. The intimations given us in revelation 
of what awaits us there are slight and vague. The 
only shape in which these become at all serviceable 
to us is when they are clothed and embodied in the 
forms which our senses have made familiar to us. 
Among all these symbols, none better presents the 
realities of the future life to our earthly minds than 
the figure of a city, because that idea embodies in 
itself so many types of the best activities and most 
coveted conditions of the soul. A city stands for the 
highest works of man's mind at its best estate. It 
represents that permanence of abode which brings a 
sense of security and of continuity in life. At the 
same time it suggests all the change of scene and 
the diversified contacts which supply stimulus to the 
various faculties. A city is the means of those mul- 
tiplied companionships which foster the sense of 



THE CITY THAT IS TO COME. 



203 



brotherhood and feed the social hunger. Its crowd- 
ing dwellings and the multitudes which throng its 
streets are a sign of the society which man's soul 
seeks as it develops, the desire for which drives him 
from savage solitudes to the company of beings like 
himself. A city is a place where architecture endows 
man's home with a grandeur or a beauty second only 
to that which shines on him from the works of nature. 
Within its limits are assembled the works of art and 
the products of industry which his hand and brain 
have wrought. Its marts, its schools, its halls of jus- 
tice and of legislature, are witnesses of the best and 
most enduring 1 works of his intellect. Its churches 
express a worship which reaches after the highest 
power and spirit of life. In the populous and pros- 
perous city we have a symbol of the things man loves 
most, seeks most, finds most congenial to his hopes. 
It concentrates the ideas which dominate his mind. 
In selecting it, therefore, to represent the condition 
of our souls in the future, the writer of the Epistle 
to the Hebrews has chosen a pregnant figure. It 
carries the mind forward into a state of existence 
which, by implication, is prefigured and suggested in 
the peculiarities of the present. The soul is glad 
of even a hint of an analogy between the seen and 
the unseen. It would fain wring from the silence of 
nature some sign of the invisible for which nature 
stands as an interpreter. And this craving makes 
it hail the clear promises of revelation, which go far 
enough at least to comfort the soul, and give it a 
suggestion of what cannot be told in the human 



204 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



tongue. To know, therefore, that the present life 
is a transient foreshadowing of an eternal condition, 
is a deep and holy satisfaction. To be told that in 
place of the fleeting cities which are but tents in our 
march through this world, we are to have a continu- 
ing city on high, is a message whose import every 
heart can understand, a blessing and a reassurance 
to our souls. 

But while we are permitted to look forward, beyond 
the limits of our earthly life, for fuller and more satis- 
fying conditions, we are not left at liberty to scorn 
this present life. God made this world. He made 
the life which roots itself in matter. He made it as 
the preparation for the life of pure spirit. And so he 
made a life we have no right to despise. They who 
affect to scorn and hate this present world and all its 
life, if they are not hypocritical, are at least seriously 
irreverent. For both are from the same hand. He 
who made the spirit, made the body in which it dwells. 
He who made the invisible things that endure, made 
also the visible which pass away. The brain is God's 
handiwork as well as the mind which animates it ; 
the hand as truly as the intellect which guides it. 
That is a fatally defective philosophy which, like one 
so popular to-day, finds it necessary to belittle and to 
cast reproach upon matter, in order to exalt the place 
of mind and of spirit. It forgets that God created 
both the heavens and the earth. It ignores the truth 
that these bodies may be " a living sacrifice, holy, 
acceptable unto God." It belittles, if it does not 
deny, the fact that he who gives the spiritual body, 



THE CITY THAT IS TO COME. 



205 



gives us also the "natural " body, and that one is just 
as " real " as the other. There is a great deal of cur- 
rent thinking which is as dangerous and as mislead- 
ing as any of the ancient heresies which darkened 
men's minds into a belief in the essential evil of mat- 
ter. It is not to be wondered at that people are recoil- 
ing from the rank materialism of the last ten years ; 
nor is it strange that the reaction should beget some 
vagaries and errors. But one need not be a material- 
ist to believe in the reality of matter, in its essential 
usefulness and holiness, in the necessity ol its exist- 
ence, and in its influence over mind. And above all 
it will be found dangerous in the end to misrepresent 
the functions of this world of matter, or the relation 
it sustains to the divine will and being. 

For without doubt this visible world is all a part 
of the divine thought and fabric. The whole uni- 
verse is the changing thought of God. He drew 
the curves which bound this sphere on which we 
dwell. He projected the majestic lines which mark 
its orbit and track the progress of the planets through 
the skies. It was he who framed the animate crea- 
tion, shaping all those forms and devising those 
mechanisms which appear in their beauty and their 
usefulness only to the studious eye. These wondrous 
fabrications in external nature, which it is the proud- 
est achievement of thought to unravel, are a web knit 
up by the divine mind. Take a microscope and 
study the strict and delicate patterns, the geometric 
exactness, the exquisite beauty, of the minutest visi- 
ble forms. These are the fine fabric from his fingers. 



206 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



Turn your telescope on the stars, as their vast magni- 
tudes move through such far-reaching courses, always 
exact to the fraction of a second in the times of 
their going and coming. These are the issue of the 
heavenly thought and will. These are the work 
of the Almighty God in the world of matter. Let 
no man call it a " vile " world on which the divine 
thought has been thus lavished. The transparent 
blue of the dome where the sun blazes at noon ; the 
flying cloud that speeds across its spaces ; the shadow 
of the cloud upon the mountain ; the brook that leaps 
from the hillside, and the broad river, bathing the 
rushes and the flowers of the valley ; the ocean roar- 
ing all day in its hollow caves ; all these are expres- 
sions of the mind one meets at every turn in the 
world of matter and external forms, a mind delight- 
ing in beauty, moving always in grace and in majesty, 
clothing its thought with loveliness and its might 
with grandeur. This universe is God thinking ; and 
he thinks in matter as well as in the more atten- 
uated material of spirit. Indeed, materialism has no 
refutation for the claim that matter itself may be only 
a mode of force. It is not unlikely that this may 
prove to be its true definition, and that matter will be 
found to be one manifestation of the infinite energy. 
Be that as it may, that philosophy will always fail 
which attempts to banish God from the closest and 
most pervasive share in the outward world. God is 
not matter, and matter is not God. But this external 
world, while it is as distinct from the mind of God as 
the smile on your cheek or the frown on your brow is 



THE CITY THAT IS TO COME. 207 



distinct and separate from yourself, is nevertheless 
the manifestation of divine life and creative love. 
As Wordsworth says, — 

"And I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean, and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man. 
A motion and a spirit that impels . 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things." 

No less does the mind of God manifest itself in the 
experience and development of the outward world. 
The happenings of this life, as we slightingly call 
them, are the conversation of God. History is vo- 
cal with the proclamations of his presence and his 
purposes. A life's biography is the utterance of 
a thought of God. God governs the world upon a 
plan. And all the grander features come out in 
the outlines of history, the details in every man's 
private biography. He who cannot read a divine 
message in his own life, he who sees no trace of God 
in history, may lay the blame upon his own eyes. 
For Providence is as omnipresent as gravity, as per- 
vasive as the ether itself. The footsteps of the na- 
tions are the track by which God has been advancing 
to his goal. And if the dull earth under our feet 
be teeming with the signs of God's present life and 
powers, then a thousand times over is it true that his 
work and purpose break through all the disguises of 



208 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



life's incidents, to make him known to his children. 
The man of faith, from the deck of the bark in which 
he sails life's sea, may truly say, — 

" The winds that o'er my ocean run 
Reach through all heavens beyond the sun. 
Through life, through death, through fate, through time, 
Grand breaths of God, they sweep sublime." 

We cannot pause here to go back of these assump- 
tions, which are true only for those who hold to a 
belief in God. To an atheist they must be only as- 
sumptions. But one cannot forever arrest the prog- 
ress of his thought over the stumbling-blocks which 
unbelief throws down. There are some things which 
ought to be taken for granted in the light of the gos- 
pel of Christ. To Christian hearts these are truths 
resting upon solid reason. And if we accept them 
they will help us to see God in this present world, in 
this city which continues not. We shall acknowledge 
that creation, as it comes to the mind through these 
senses of ours, is a revelation of God, manifesting 
him as the body manifests the soul, as the word dis- 
closes the thought, as the caress makes known the 
affection which prompts it. 

The effect, then, of the right use of this world and 
all its experiences is to teach the soul of God. Earth 
and earthly life are to be the soul's introduction to 
God. They are the primary lessons in spiritual 
knowledge. They pave the wa}^ for those higher 
facts to which we shall be introduced when we 
put off the body. He who uses well the material 



THE CITY THAT IS TO COME. 



209 



in which man works here on earth, is best fitted to 
understand the new materials in which he will be 
called to work in the life to come. And any neglect 
of present opportunities, any slighting of our earthly 
work, will incur for us the penalties which always 
fall upon neglect and abuse of opportunity. It is a 
poor way to spend life, which makes it merely the 
learning of a few rules of practice that serve only for 
the da} r s of dwelling in this earth, and includes none 
of the principles which outlast this world and push 
forward into that which is to come. The only life 
in this fleeting city of time which can fit us for the 
abiding city to come, is a life which lets us into the 
deeper realities of being, and the truths and prin- 
ciples which never change. 

This primary fact in the faith we hold as Chris- 
tians conveys the strongest presumption that when 
we are done with this life, and pass from this city 
which continues not to that which is to come, Ave 
shall be ushered into surroundings not altogether 
unfamiliar. The truth that both the material and 
the spiritual worlds are the work of one mind, leads 
us naturally to expect that the conditions of the life 
to come will be not wholly unlike the life from 
which we go. If we had grounds for believing that 
this world were made by one God, and the world un- 
seen were made by another, we might expect that the 
transition from world to world would bring a pang of 
lonesomeness to our souls, and fill them with home- 
sickness for the dear earth they left behind. But the 
one powerful, convincing, unchangeable argument for 



210 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



the continuity of life, the analogy of this life to the 
life beyond death, the reproduction in the city that is 
to come of the forms, the types, the ideas, and the 
relationships of this world, is the unity of God's 
nature, the unchangeableness of the mind of God. 
" If I were to construct," says Mr. Munger, " one 
all-embracing argument for immortality, and were I 
to put it all into one word, it would be — God." 
And so, to paraphrase that pregnant sentence, if we 
were to construct one comprehensive argument for 
the faith that the future will be no strange, unfa- 
miliar state, in which our souls shall wander like 
solitaries in a land of aliens, it, too, should be 
summed up in the one word — God ! If any man 
asks me why I believe in the persistence of personal 
identity, in the recognition of friends, in the repeti- 
tion of a scenery or an environment which will make 
the future a congenial home to these sensitive souls 
of ours, I answer always in that one word — God ! 
I dare not base my faith on the yearnings of the 
human heart, for our desires often mislead and de- 
ceive us. I dare not rest upon the analogies of this 
present life, for we may select the wrong ones, and 
confuse ourselves out of our own ignorance. I find 
no satisfaction in the messages which claim to be 
spoken back from the departed, for these are nearly 
always words which savor of this world, and tell us 
nothing we have not already inferred. I find no ab- 
solute scientific warrant for a belief which so clearly 
transcends the sphere of science. But I can rest in 
ahsolute faith and unshaken serenity upon the nature 



THE CITY THAT IS TO COME. 



211 



and the being of Almighty God, as those discover 
themselves in his methods here upon earth. God 
is as true to himself, and as consistent with his own 
nature, as his sons and daughters are to themselves. 
He works always in a manner of his own. Every- 
where in the creation as it falls under our eyes, we 
see repetitions, variations, remodellings, of the ways 
and the shapes which the Divine Creator seems to 
love, and to love to use again and again. It is one 
of the marks of human identity that the mind leaves 
its own peculiar seal upon everything it touches. 
Every master has a style of his own. The great 
artists, the painters, the sculptors, the musicians, are 
distinguished from one another by the styles in which 
the}^ do their work. Michael Angelo has his method, 
Titian has his, and Rubens his. You would never 
mistake a work of Sebastian Bach for one by Freder- 
ick Chopin. The Hindu architects built their massive 
temples in one style, the Egyptians adopted another, 
and the Greeks a third. You would not attribute the 
Sphinx to the Italian sculptors, nor the Gothic cathe- 
drals to the rude builders of the Aztec piles. Every 
work of art or of original design carries the mark of 
its maker. We recognize the author by his manner. 
When we see a house with certain peculiarities we 
say, " Such a one built that ; " and the anonymous 
book almost certainly betrays its hidden author. 

So, on the other hand, you know that if your 
worker is to undertake something new, it will bear 
some resemblance to what he has already done. The 
architect's house will show some feature, — a novel 



212 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



window, a peculiar roof, a porch, a mode of orna- 
mentation, which will suggest some other house of 
his. If you go to see an artist's pictures, you know 
they will show some resemblances to works of his you 
have already seen. Nature takes good care that there 
shall be no anonymous work done in this universe. 

This law is derived from the very nature of God 
himself. It is because we are made in his image 
that we love to do things in ways peculiar to our- 
selves, and to write our signatures on all our works. 
And so it is only a reversal of the law which traces 
it back to God's being, and finds it manifesting itself 
as well in all his handiwork. He works with the 
same fidelity to his methods. This is the principle 
which underlies all science, which, indeed, is the basis 
of science. For science is but the classification of 
knowledge ; and knowledge never could be classified, 
if it did not find its objects arranging themselves in 
groups, by similarities, according to established plans. 
In all the infinite variety of nature, there is, never- 
theless, a system, a recurrence of the familiar, a grate- 
ful repetition, as if there were some ways peculiarly 
dear to the Creator's heart which he delights to use 
again and again. This universe contains but few fun- 
damental types. The innumerable shapes of atoms, 
crystals, contours of the earth, orbits of the planets, 
are but variations of a few primitive forms, — the 
sphere, the cone, the cube. The botanist goes through 
the woods, the fields, and even drags the bottom of 
the sea, to fill his herbariums. And when he has 
pulled his specimens apart, he finds in them all 



THE CITY THAT IS TO COME. 213 



only a few characteristic forms. He soon assigns 
them a place in some class, order, or family, in which 
relationships appear, — likeness of. blossom or of leaf, 
peculiarities of growth, similarities of fruit. He 
finds common traits in the daisy by the dusty road- 
side and the harebell that swings in mid-air from the 
mountain crags, which range them in one class ; and 
he traces relationships of form in the bloom of the 
apple-trees, the lone beach-plum by the bleak sea, the 
strawberry, the lowly bramble, and .the roses perfum- 
ing sunny lanes in midsummer, which group them 
all together in one family. 

The zoologist has the same story to tell us. He, 
too, finds the old familiar forms of structure worked 
over into a multitude of curious and ingenious plans. 
The lizard and the snake reveal a structure kindred 
to the tiger in the jungle and the soaring eagle. He 
finds a prophecy in the fishes of the earliest geologic 
ages, which are preserved by him only by their fos- 
sils, of that bodily structure which is raised to such 
dignity in the frame of man. The human skeleton is 
only the skeleton of the pterodactyl or the ichthyo- 
saurus worked over and adapted to modern times. 
Think for a moment how strikingly this fact finds 
illustration in the human race itself. The members 
of our human family are of such various traits that 
no two of them ever were exactly alike. Yet such a 
general resemblance appears in us all, that whenever 
one meets a man he encounters the same passions, the 
same mental faculties, the same directing will. A 
man is a man the world over. 



214 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



But there is a deeper meaning in this universal 
law than any but the most reverent and far-sighted 
science puts upon. it. Here are the proofs, written 
in every flower, whispered in every wind, emphasized 
in every motion of every living creature, that the 
mind which conceived the universe is one, and that 
it has the same fondness for beautiful and convenient 
methods which the human intellect displays. Here 
is evidence that wherever God puts forth his creative 
force, he will leave some unmistakable sign of him- 
self. The page of the universe is all in one hand- 
writing. If we were to go to the outermost star in 
space, we should find things familiar and natural to 
our senses ; just as the explorer, in the wildest jungle 
of the tropics or the barred coasts of the polar seas, 
discerns many a plant, and many a living thing, to 
remind him of those he used to see in his own town, 
perhaps in his own dooryard. You never can feel 
like a stranger in any part of this earth. For where- 
ever you may go, God has been there before you — 
the same God who caused the tender grass to grow 
beside your doorstep, and who made the moon to 
shine last night in at your chamber window. 

Now, why should we suppose that what we call the 
spiritual world, the world, that is, which awaits our 
spirits when once they are emancipated from our 
bodies, is unlike this natural ? Why should we ex- 
pect everything to be unfamiliar, bewildering, novel ? 
Or why should we think that we are to find nothing 
there for which our experience here has fitted us ? 
Is there not one God for both worlds — for all 



THE CITY THAT IS TO COME. 



215 



worlds ? Hath not the same hand made the heavens 
and the earth ? Must we think that God has forgotten 
himself and changed his nature in the objects and 
arrangements of the spiritual world ? — that he has 
become tired of his good and familiar methods ? If 
you were going from our northern latitudes to the 
shores of India, or to the far-away settlements of 
New Zealand, you would not feel that you were cut- 
ting loose from all your past knowledge, the lessons 
of your memory, the stock and store of facts and rea- 
soning which have served you here. Or if you could 
be transported to any one of the planets which keep 
us company in the ceaseless whirl about the sun, 
to Jupiter, or remote Neptune, your geometry, your 
chemistry, your physics, would be just as serviceable 
to you as ever. You would find the same funda- 
mental principles holding good in the uttermost 
parts of the creation ; because creation is the prod- 
uct of One Hand, and that hand leaves its mark 
inscribed on every one of its works. By that same 
sign have we not a right to expect similarities, the 
repetition of the well-known relations and forms of 
the visible, when we pass into the unseen world? 
Can it be possible that the touch of the divine fin- 
gers, which lias made every corner of this earth seem 
homelike to the human mind, is never to be seen 
when we drop these mortal eyes to see with those 
of pure spirit? 

Suppose an angel were to come out of the invisible 
into this material world. Do you suppose he would 
feel lost here ? Would he find no objects, no solitary 



216 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



organism, no customs of this earth-world, to remind 
him of the scenery and beings he had left behind? 
Or do you suppose that he would discover on every 
hand fresh tokens that he was in a world created by 
the same Power that made the realms from which he 
had strayed away? I cannot believe he would feel 
lost or lonely. I am sure he would be reminded of 
the city which abides, in every street and mansion of 
this which continues not. And so I rest firmly in the 
faith that when the proceeding is reversed, and the in- 
telligent soul goes forth into the unknown, by the 
very fact that God is, and that he is the same yester- 
day and to-day and forever, the same in all worlds 
and in all systems, that soul will find itself sur- 
rounded by the dear familiar forms, the well-known 
signs of its God and its Father, which have revealed 
him here and now. "Whither shall I go from thy 
Spirit?" says the psalmist, " or whither shall I flee 
from thy presence ? If I ascend up into heaven, thou 
art there : if I make my bed in the grave, behold, 
thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, 
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea ; even 
there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall 
hold me." 

In these words you may read the assurance that he 
who goes- from this life goes to no strange city where 
he shall sigh in his lonesome thoughts for the world 
he has left, the blessed scenes he no more beholds. 
Wherever God is, and his works, and the systems and 
worlds he has brought forth, there you and I, his 
children, will be at home. It is always home to us 



THE CITY THAT IS TO COME. 



217 



where God is. We shall never feel strange and soli- 
tary in any place which we recognize as a mansion in 
our Father's house. God's ways will always remind 
us of other ways of his that we have known. There 
is a deep truth in the doctrine Emmanuel Swedenborg 
taught concerning correspondences. It is only an- 
other way of asserting God's consistency with him- 
self. He who gave us the flowers which bloom in 
earthly springtimes will give us in that invisible world 
something of which these blossoms are but a type 
and pattern. The cloud that drifts across the sunset 
prefigures a like beauty in the firmament behind the 
one we see. The solemn chant of the sea as it breaks 
all day upon its rocks is teaching the ear of him 
who lies upon the headland, to listen for the wonder- 
ful sound of that note made by " the waters that be 
above the heavens." So, too, the dear faces that beam 
upon us here, and come to stand so utterly for the 
spirits they cover that when they pass from our sight 
we weep as if the very souls of our darlings were 
gone too — these very masks of mortality are pre- 
paring us to recognize, by and by, the invisible and 
spiritual creatures who wear them. 
- Let, therefore, the fashion of this world pass away ! 
Let mortality hasten through its brief years ! The 
perishing body, the vanishing scenery of this life, 
take with them nothing which is not replaced by the 
same power which made the transient city we abide 
in for a time. The new things God has in store 
cannot be altogether unlike the old which have been 
so dear. That is the pledge of these earthly scenes, 



218 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



the assurance they give of what is to come. Let 
love fasten itself as strongly as it will upon the 
beauty and the grandeur of this transient city, with- 
out dread of bereavement in the change which trans- 
fers us to other scenes. For — 

"Not alone we land upon that shore, 
'Twill be as though we had been there before; 

We shall meet more we know 

Than we can meet below; 
And find our rest like some returning dove, 
And be at home at once with the Eternal Love." 



WHITE UOBES AND PALM BRANCHES. 219 



WHITE ROBES AND PALM BRANCHES; 

OR, 

THE VICTORY OF HOLINESS. 



Rev. vii.9, 14. — "After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, 
which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and peo- 
ple, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed 
in white robes, and with palms in their hands. . . . And he said to 
me, These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have 
washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb." 



The Revelation of St. John is a magnificent spec- 
tacular prophecy. It sets forth great principles in 
bold and brilliant pictures. It uses the bitter expe- 
riences which befell Christian hearts in dreadful per- 
secutions, as the means of showing forth the divine 
providence and purpose of deliverance. With the 
blood of present martyrdoms for a symbol, it depicts 
the struggle and woe of a world at strife. And with 
the white light shining in the Christian faith, it shows 
forth the blessed consummation of victory, the tri- 
umph of the Christ. It is one of the most stirring 
of writings. It moves the heart because it is so filled 
with the pathos and the tragedy of those days of 



220 



THE LEISURE OF GOB. 



bloody persecution in which it was written. " With- 
out tears," says Bengel, " it was not written ; without 
tears it cannot be understood." It is a set of dazzling 
pictures, " Wherein," says Herder, the great poet- 
theologian, "are set forth the rise, the visible exis- 
tence, and the general future of Christ's kingdom, in 
figures and similitudes of his first coming, to terrify 
and to console." 

In the passage which stands as our text, we have 
one of the glimpses of the victory which in those 
days of tribulation and anguish must have seemed so 
very remote and hard to believe. The innumerable 
throng in white robes, with palms in their hands, wear 
and bear the symbols of triumph. They stand forth 
in the din and clash of the contending forces depicted 
in this book, the happy participants in the glory and 
the purity of the victorious Lamb. Their white robes 
mean holiness. Their waving palms mean victory. 
The two symbols standing together set forth the 
triumph of holiness. That is the burden of the 
whole book. It is the glorious message which 
shines down to us from all those stormy pictures. 
The victory of the good, the end of strife in the 
purification of the world — this is the great thought 
poured out of the heart of that mystic utterance of 
the beloved apostle. Victory through struggle and 
tribulation — that is the outcome of the world and the 
creation, prophesied in this vision of the multitude in 
white robes. 

But the form and suggestions of the vision bring 
to the mind not alone the victory, but the means 



WHITE ROBES AND PALM BRANCHES. 221 



as well. In the very thought of a victory, there is 
also the thought of a battle. Winning only comes 
of striving. The creation is to make its way to this 
victory through struggle. And the same thought 
which carries the mind to the consummation of toil 
and suffering carries it back also to the weariness 
and the pain and the conflict out of which that end 
has been wrought. u Lo, a great multitude, clothed 
in white robes, and with palms " — "These are they 
which have come out of great tribulation." There 
is a long look ahead in those words. But there is 
also a long look backward, as they, in one sentence, 
not only forecast the future, but sum up the past. 

For the whole history of this creation is a history of 
strife. The record goes far back, back, indeed, be- 
yond the dawn of history, farther even than the 
creation of man. The very beasts of primeval ages on 
this earth, as if in dismal anticipation of human his- 
tory, grappled and tore each other on the shores of 
paleozoic seas, and in the depths of the mammoth for^ 
ests of the carboniferous age. As far back as we find 
life we find strife. Strength prevailed over weakness, 
and that which was fittest for the grapple with the 
grim earth and its conditions survived in triumph. 
Little connection indeed there may seem to be between 
the brutal struggles of competing strength in those 
dim ages of the earth's infancy, and the victory of 
goodness seen by the Re vela tor. But this much 
binds the two into one great system ; these early 
struggles are manifestations of the one law whose 
final application includes the human soul in its most 



222 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



glorious estate. These are the roots of the great law, 
deep in the dark world of physical existence, whose 
flowering branches lift their tops to the very heavens. 
It is the warning of outward nature that as soon as 
life begins, strife begins too. There is a pathetic 
significance in the divine provision by which even 
the dumb brute, dying in his unconsciousness of all 
higher life and motives, assists at laying the founda- 
tions of that process destined to reach through all 
ages, and come to perfection only with their consum- 
mation, by which the highest things and the most 
worthy victories are achieved, by blood, by sweat, and 
by travail of soul. 

Does the mind demand to know how it is to be 
with these dumb things that have gone down to 
silence at the head of this long procession of life, 
perishing long before there was any intelligent eye 
to see their suffering, or any being whose moral gain 
could be subserved by their destruction ? It takes a 
strong head to go back to these days which antedate 
humanity and not grow dizzy. There is so much 
there which is full of mystery, and challenges the 
reason and the moral sense. It seems a hard law 
which holds these lower types of life to the necessity 
of struggle and pain unless they, too, shall, somewhere 
and sometime, know the bliss of victory, and find a 
compensation for suffering in redemption from its 
thrall. It is not enough that we say of these that 
they have entered into the sum-total of life, and given 
themselves to be " the sweet presence of a good dif- 
fused." There they lie on the very first battle-fields 



WHITE ROUES AND PALM BRANCHES. 223 



of existence. Shall they still lie unconscious of any 
good when the race which lias carried on their struggle 
comes home to its triumph ? We cannot read the 
mystery. But there is nothing in reason or in revela- 
tion to forbid the belief that somehow these, too, shall 
enter in some way into the grand and blessed result. 

" That nothing walks with aimless feet; 
That not one life shall be destroyed, 
Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
When God hath made the pile complete." 

Come forward in time to the later day to which 
the thought of victory still carries us back. Now 
it is no longer the earth covered with monsters and 
mites that tear one another in their rage, and over- 
come by talon and tusk. Here is man at last, unmis- 
takably himself even in those primitive days of his 
ignorance and of his weakness. But here, too, the 
same law is in force that existence is a struggle. 
Here is man engaged in conflict with the beasts that 
were here before him. Here he is struggling with 
the elements more pitiless than the beasts. Here 
he grapples with his fellowman in a struggle for 
existence in which craft matches itself with craft, 
and strength with strength, to get the scanty food 
which will keep body and soul together. It seems 
like a battle without anything heroic or inspiring. 
It is like the quarrelling of dogs for a bone. Viewed 
in the light of these latter days, it is a wild carnival 
of brutality. But if we disengage ourselves from the 
prepossessions of a morality which applies only to 



224 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



our own time, and judge those men in relation to 
their own time and by the light which nickered 
faintly in their understandings, then shall we find 
after all, in those crude and brawling struggles, the 
small beginnings of a better age. Those were battles 
for the right to live. The chieftain who slew the 
most foes, in the effort to get for his clan a larger 
portion of food, was the Cromwell or the Washington 
of those twilight ages. And if we can look beyond 
the accidents of the struggle, if Ave can regard the 
bloodshed and the cruelty as only incidental, and 
remember that the chief end of all this repulsive 
activity is to preserve the life of humanity and give 
it a chance to grow and to develop, we may see still 
the connection a little closer, and a little more plainly 
shown, of these early victories of the strong with 
that final triumph of the apostle's vision. 

Come forward a step more in history, to where 
men have learned to till the soil and build their 
cities, and so to need the land, and prize it as a 
source of subsistence. Now the struggle is for pos- 
session of the soil. It is for the fields which stretch 
away from the home lands. It is for the right to 
till those home lands without molestation. Still the 
old battle goes on, and the enjoyment of existence 
is only bought by strife. But now the aim and 
motive of the struggle have risen a little; and we can 
begin to see, emerging from mists of barbarism, the 
higher purposes which enlist the sympathies of even 
the hio-hest and most cultivated minds of these last 
days. It is a battle now for a better form of exist- 



WHITE ROBES AND PALM BRANCHES. 225 

ence, a more peaceful life, and a struggle to defend 
and perpetuate that life in the face of attacks of those 
not yet advanced beyond the earlier stages of hu- 
manity. In the intervals of the wars by which peace 
is won, and opportunity, and a place for the new civil- 
ization, there arises a new form of struggle, in which, 
there are no blows and no bloodshed, but only the 
sharp strife of competition in buying and selling, 
in producing and in exchange. When the militant 
form of society, whose normal condition is one of 
warfare, gives way even in part to the industrial, 
which uses force only as a means of protection, the 
old struggle is not ended. It has only assumed 
a new form. It has become the contest of the mar- 
ket, the battle of money, the war which has for its 
aim the getting of a better living. 

So, as we get down into the region where authentic 
history begins, we find larger data from which to es- 
timate the changes in the character of this age-long 
struggle by which mankind rises. And their evidence 
points alwa}^s to the disappearance of the old aims, 
and the introduction of new and higher ones. " The 
history of mankind," says Fiske, " has been largely 
made up of fightings ; but in the careers of the most 
progressive races, this fighting has been far from 
meaningless, like the battles of kites and crows. . . . 
During the historic period the wars of Europe have 
been either contests between the industrial and the 
predatory types of society, or the contests incident 
to the imperfect formation of large political aggre- 
gates." That means that even where force has been 



226 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



the means, and bloodshed the dreadful condition, the 
purpose of the struggle has been something higher 
than for plunder or for land. It has shifted to the 
higher effort for greater security in the rights by 
which society subsists, and the individual is secured 
in his own best development. It has had in view the 
amelioration of society. It has sought the establish- 
ment of more rational modes of government. It 
has aimed at more freedom, and a better chance 
of life's good for the individual. It has contemplated 
the restriction of tyrannies and the removal of 
injustice. 

With these new aims have come new methods too. 
The conflicts of the historic period have not all been 
those of arms. They have often been the bloodless 
battles of brain with brain. They have been waged 
by statesmen in legislatures, by reformers in pulpits 
and in schools. They have been won by the suffrages 
of the many, uniting in resolves in which the world 
has quietly acquiesced. It is not always easy to see 
in the new and peaceful methods of later centuries 
any connection with the rough feuds and violent 
measures of the primitive man. But they are all 
the outcome of that one universal law, that there 
is no good thing won without struggle, and that 
every struggle brings the world nearer to the tri- 
umph of the good. Those terrible chapters in the 
Old Testament which you and I read with such a 
shrinking, and wish were out of it, because they seem 
to us so out of harmony with a revealing of a Divine 
will, are simply the rude manifestation in a rude peo- 



WHITE ROBES AND PALM BRANCHES. 227 



pie of this old and comprehensive law. They were 
the efforts to establish the body politic, the national 
life of Israel, long enough for its ideas to germinate 
and take root. The Christian of the future will one 
day read the story of our Revolution as we read 
these. The wars which shattered the Roman Em- 
pire Avere battering down an outgrown state in order 
that a new and better might be reared. The strug- 
gles of the Reformation, consecrated to man's spir- 
itual freedom, were perhaps the loftiest in motive 
on which man ever had entered. The rise of the 
Netherlands was a struggle for a vital principle in 
the existence of society. The French Revolution 
was a terrible outbreak, in which imbruted man 
struck for a freedom which should make him less 
a brute. In our own history, of the two great wars 
which have really reached any profound depth in 
the national life, the war of the Revolution was 
fought in behalf of the pacific principle of equal 
representation, the war of the Rebellion was fought 
to maintain the peaceful principle of federalism. 
Both of them were wars in behalf of peace, strug- 
gles which helped forward the day when such strife 
shall become unnecessary. 

So it is struggle and struggle, over and over again, 
from age to age ! Only the objects change for which 
the struggle is made, and the battle won. It is no 
longer for a dinner that men fight, for the fish to be 
caught in a particular river, the deer that roam in a 
certain forest. They strive now for principles, for 
ideas, for rights, for moral ends, for justice, for equity, 



228 



THE LEISURE OF GOB. 



for law, and for peace. To be sure, there are still 
some of the old-fashioned wars, fought with the old- 
fashioned weapons, ay, even for the old-fashioned 
objects, for bread and for meat. Because all the old 
barbarian is not expelled from humanity, and be- 
cause, alas ! there are some who still lack the simplest 
necessaries of life, and for whom society provides no 
place, no work, and no recompense. But, after all, 
the warfare is urged on a far higher plane, the aims are 
broader, and the weapons finer and more effective. 
Mind is in the ascendency. Conscience has the lead. 
The persuasions of reason are more effectual than 
the spear, the sword, or the rifle. Votes go farther 
and accomplish more than volleys. The voice of the 
teacher and the preacher replaces the shout of 
the warrior. The world is nearer still to the ideal 
of the vision, the victory of the righteous, and the 
glory of the white-robed throng. These very wars 
are for the sake of the highest principles. And they 
point to a time when the battle shall be without 
blood, and the triumph be dimmed by no tears. 

For who does not see that this incessant move- 
ment of the human race implies the prevailing power 
of righteousness ? Who fails to see that in all these 
later struggles the victory lies more and more with 
the right? The new civilization gives an ever enlar- 
ging power to the good. Its struggles are more and 
more in the interests of man's higher nature. He 
used to fight for his stomach ; now he fights for his 
intellect and his conscience. Once the battle was to 
the strong arm of force. Now it is to the vigorous 



WHITE ROBES AND PALM BRANCHES. 229 



mind or the unyielding moral sense. Once men 
believed that God was on the side of the strongest 
battalions. Now they are learning that not all the 
armies that ever were marshalled are able to maintain 
a lie, to keep up an imposture, or to fix a tyranny 
upon the human race. They are learning that there 
can be no permanent triumph for evil. It suffers 
more by winning than by defeat. The only real vic- 
tories are those of righteousness. The only real 
victors are they in robes of white. 

Now, one great and comprehensive reason for this 
change in the field and the methods of struggle is 
the chancre in man's own nature, the working- off of 
the animal parts, the inheritance of this flesh, and the 
unfolding of his moral and spiritual nature. For as 
soon as man begins to grow at all he grows toward 
goodness. The progress of the human race is a prog- 
ress up, and not down. It is a progress toward 
spirituality, not toward animalism. It is a progress 
toward order, and peace, and obedience, and law. 
To secure this progress involves a struggle in man's 
own heart. It involves the wrestle between the flesh 
and the spirit, selfishness and the growing spirit of 
love, lawlessness and righteousness. The first am- 
bitions of the human heart were in the direction of 
prowess, skill in arms, strength, and capacity of body. 
The first heroes were warriors and hunters, men emi- 
nent in those lower powers which give success in the 
grapple with the coarse elemental forces which man 
must master before he can rule nature. Then came 
a period of new ambitions and new accomplishments. 



230 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



Nimrod and Samson were no longer the greatest 
heroes. There is a skill born of the understanding, 
and power which comes of knowledge ; and this was 
the next stage of admiration and ambition to which 
man advanced. Mercury was now his god, and Her- 
cules was no longer more than a demigod. And 
finally he came to see that there was an ideal of 
character higher even than the intellectual ; and 
moral aims and moral power grew to be more and 
mean more than force or craft, strength or wisdom. 
And the heroes of the last stage are the Luthers, the 
Wilberforces, the Garrisons, — ay, Wesley and Au- 
gustine and Paul. As man grows up from one 
ideal like this to another, he is involved in struggles 
within himself. First he strives with muscle, then 
with mind, and then with heart and conscience. 
The field of the conflict shifts within him, as he 
strives to master one after another the difficulties of 
matter and the elements, the problems of knowledge, 
and the tasks that conscience sets. But all the 
strength he ever gained, from the time when he slew 
the mammoth to the day that he abolished slavery, 
man has evolved in himself by patient and persistent 
struggles, the labor and the travail of ages. This 
strength has risen in its character, from a mere 
power of eye and hand and foot, to a command of 
the very secret forces of heaven itself, the resources 
of righteousness and the faculties of love. 

Thus it is that all the long look backward to which 
the text necessarily leads us, shows us one steady con- 
flict along the whole way from the dreary lowlands 



WHITE ROBES AND PALM BRANCHES. 231 

where the human race begun, up to the fair plains 
where now it builds the cities of its pride and power. 
Man has fought his way to the higher life. All his 
upward struggle has pointed to a time when good 
shall triumph over evil, holiness prevail over sin, 
and the final victory rest with the white-robed ones, 
cleansed in the blood of the Lamb. 

That is the meaning of all this strife, this eternal 
battle from the beginning on till now and even be- 
yond. It has all tended toward the victory of right- 
eousness. God must triumph, and all the brood of 
evil things that infest existence be destroyed. That 
was the meaning of the struggle for existence which 
peopled the earth with living creatures, each the best 
of its kind. That was the meaning of the struggle 
between man and beast which gave the dominion of 
the earth to man. " The seed of the woman shall 
bruise the serpent's head." That was the meaning 
of the struggle for sustenance and dominion which 
pushed the vigorous tribes of Asia ever westward, 
bearing with them a better civilization. That was 
the meaning of ancient wars with all their pain and 
loss. All these old struggles drive straight toward 
the moral realm, and the life of the spirit of man. 
All the strife within his own heart, as the centuries 
have passed, has looked to the rule of the best in 
man over the worst, the moral over the animal, the 
good over the evil. The very first conflict that ever 
startled the face of the earth was the beginning of a 
struggle which was destined to end in one way and 
only one, — the victory of righteousness, and the 



232 



THE LEISURE OF GOD. 



establishment of holiness as the normal condition of 
all creatures. 

What then ? Is all struggle to end with the triumph 
of good over evil ? Will there be no more conflicts 
in the new creation? Shall the habit of striving 
which man has acquired in all his long years of ap- 
prenticeship on earth be useless, and have to be un- 
learned? Shall we never more feel the old thrill of 
excitement as we turn to some new task and grapple 
with some new antagonist in our way ? Will growth 
and progress come without effort, and the life of the 
future be an easy and exertion less jaunt down the 
everlasting ages? That does not follow at all from 
the truth that the culmination of the ages is to come 
in the triumph of the good. There are struggles 
which bring no pain. There are battles which in- 
volve no blood nor tragedy. Take evil out of the case, 
and struggle becomes a joy. It is not difficult to 
conceive of a life in which all effort will be joyful, 
and the most severe struggles productive of the 
keenest delights. The struggle of the musician with 
a hard composition is no hardship, but a glorious 
pleasure. The task the scholar sets himself, to which 
he gives himself with relentless industry, becomes the 
desire of his life. Newton, writing the " Principia " 
with infinite toil and sacrifice, was a man to be envied. 
Horace Mann, giving his life-strength in the work of 
education, was fighting: a battle in which there was no 
pain and no tragedy. Beethoven, spending himself 
in the labors of composition, framing the master-music 
which was to charm and inspire the world, was in pain- 



WHITE ROBES AND PALM BRANCHES. 233 



less travail. So let us believe it will be in that future 
when evil is abolished. Then we all may toil on, yet 
without pain. We all may strive, lawfully and joy- 
fully, forever rising over new difficulties, spending 
strength and thought and love without one pang of 
bitterness or disappointment or grief. 

This is a blessed thought whenever it comes to 
us. For it always finds us plunged in the very heat 
and turmoil of our earthly battles. It overtakes 
us weary, and hot, and begrimed with the fray. 
" Fio-htinofs within and foes without " molest and 
overwhelm us. As year after year goes by and 
brings no change, the heart fails, and our spirits 
ebb low. But courage, Christians ! The end draws 
on ; and the end is sure. It is not for naught that 
we are toiling and fighting. Loyalty and patience 
shall have their reward. The evils which afflict us 
are short of life. The good we think so slow to 
come will include the whole creation, and when it 
comes will stay forever. 

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, 
Seem here no painful inch to gain, 
Far back, through creeks and inlets making, 
Comes silent, flooding in, the main. 

And not by eastern windows only 
When daylight comes, comes in the light; 
In front the sun climbs slow, — how slowly ! 
But westward, look, the land is bright. 



(it 



